Australia. Part II

March 1–3, 2009

Australia has an incredibly well-developed system of veterinary and phytosanitary control. It starts at the airport, where you’re asked to declare any food items you’ve brought with you, including dried fruit and nuts.

Australians protect their flora and fauna from more than just foreign invasion. Even within the continent itself, there are places to which it’s forbidden to bring certain items. This highway sign, for instance, warns you not to carry any fruit into a 10 km zone.

It should be noted that Australians are not in the habit of throwing garbage out their car window, so this sort of visual communication relies on the presumption of a preexisting high level of environmental consciousness.

Roadside signs constantly remind drivers about the necessity of stopping to rest. Sometimes the sheer number of them actually does make you start to nod off. “Microsleep Kills in Seconds.” Or, “Trouble Concentrating? Powernap Now.”

Chiltern

A mini-town. Interestingly, old post boxes still stand all throughout the country. And almost all of them are different models. The only thing they have in common is that they’re tall and red.

Melbourne

Melbourne is often contrasted with Sydney in the same way that Moscow is contrasted with Saint Petersburg, or New York with San Francisco. The city is quite strange. The entire area along the sea is occupied by some sort of petroleum facilities and hangars.

Beyond this blight begins a charming city, but you never quite lose the feeling of being in close proximity to an industrial zone.

Australia has an absolutely awesome pedestrian crossing sign. It depicts pair of legs inside an orange (or sometimes bright green) circle.

A typical Melbourne alley.

A typical Melbourne sign which permits right turns only from the left lane. They have a tricky system like that here.

Every city has its own sign forbidding the consumption of alcohol on the street. The one here looks like this:

Curiously, fire hydrants on buildings in Australia are hidden behind decorative panels instead of simply sticking out from the wall. This means the firefighters are astute.

A classic telephone half-booth.

One of the older post box models.

Traffic lights.

When a tram stops, all the cars naturally stop too, to let passengers get on/off. Also, flags with stop signs automatically pop out from the tram doors.

The police logo consists of three rows of blue checkers, like in Britain.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of an old and new electrical box, which demonstrates that everything used to look more interesting and was better made in the past (see § 151. Time makes things worse).

Melbourne seems to have a particularly careless attitude when it comes to cables going into electrical boxes.

Street porches are also not always terribly cozy. The effort seems to end at putting out a few tables and surrounding them with some kind of barrier. Say what you will, but you won’t find nooks like this one in other Australian cities.

There’s a big Chinatown here, where everything is written in Chinese and you see only Chinese people on the street. Reminded me of London.

There’s also a Greek neighborhood. Here, everything is covered with ornaments and sirtaki can be heard playing in every bar. Melbourne is the sister city of Thessaloniki, it turns out.

Portland

I collect cities with the same name. For example, this is already my second Portland (after Portland, USA). Portlands are easier to collect than places whose name begins with “Ust-,” of which, as it turned out, there are over three hundred.

Australia has made a cult of worshipping the soldiers who died in World War I. After Earl Kitchener had mobilized everyone fit for military service (see § 154. Have YOU made a finger-pointing poster?), it became necessary to deploy reserve troops from Australia and New Zealand.

Naturally, many died. So monuments were erected in their honor in every last town and village. The monuments are all the same: a white figure of a soldier in a hat with a rifle. Every Australian city has something like an officers’ club dedicated to the soldiers who perished in those years. You really get the impression that when the Soviet Union was devising its cult of soldiers of victory and memorials to the fallen of World War II, it took a page or two from Australia’s book.

Interestingly, half the antique post boxes are functional to this day (the other half have the letter slot welded shut).

We shan’t ever return here.

Farmers’ post boxes are a special item of interest. They come in two types—one looks like a doghouse on stilts, the other is made out of spare barrels and cylinders.

Here’s the first type:

And here’s the second. A post box made out of a milk churn.

And a barrel one.

It seems that the farmers frown upon buying mass-produced post boxes (but you’ll see some store-bought ones as you get near the cities).

All the road shoulders in the country are demarcated by white lines with raised stripes, which cause a palpable vibration in the car when you drive over them.

Those who nonetheless managed to drive over the shoulder and all the way to a tree get a commemorative black marker.

The sign claims that there are also red markers with a white stripe for those who didn’t die. But I never came across any of them—the red markers I saw also had crosses on them.

Mount Gambier

Another city about which there isn’t anything to say.

Perhaps only that it has interesting lampposts and another old post box variety that resembles an ancient Greek column.

The only thing I never did encounter is a kangaroo. At best, I saw something rat-like dart through the bushes a couple of times. Then again, there are many of them on the highways—as roadkill.

Kangaroo meat tastes terrible.