Along the road to Gundagai
Wombats, bogans, beer and vast, open spaces with nary a soul in sight. What’s not to love about southeast Australia in winter? Well, as Cecilie Gamst Berg discovers, there are one or two things …
“What Victoria’s Secret? It’s cold with crap beaches.”
It takes me a few moments to get this joke, on a billboard advert for some radio station or other, high above Sydney’s Parramatta Road. Beaches … what? Ah, of course! It is the state of Victoria, home of Sydney’s arch enemy, Melbourne, they are talking about.
Crap beaches, eh? Well, we’ll soon find out, because I am going on a road trip to that very state. I have deliberately chosen to visit Australia in the deep of the southern winter; it’s green, locals don’t clog up the hotels and guest houses, the kids are at school and the beaches, crap or not, are empty.
I can go everywhere, see everything and meet everybody. OK, maybe not every single body, but there is one chap I particularly want to meet: the mighty wombat.
By far my favourite animal – yes, out-favouriting even dogs – the wombat, being Australian, is a marsupial, but dedicated digging and evolution have turned its pouch upside-down, so the wombat-joey doesn’t get soil in its eyes. Millions of years ago, the wombat was the size of a jeep, but that turned out to be impractical. Now it is as small as a medium-sized dog – and its poo is cube-shaped.
If an enemy enters its burrow, the wombat, whose spine isn’t a spine at all but a massive slab of rock-hard cartilage, will, without hesitation, crush that enemy’s head against the ceiling. As if all that wasn’t enough, the wombat is uncommonly cute, in an avuncular way. And yet, in one of the worst injustices in nature, it’s the kangaroo that wins the tourist dollar every time. Perhaps that is because the kangaroo is such a showoff, with its incessant bouncing and pugilistic stances, whereas the wombat is dignified, keeping to itself underground, where, I’m glad to say, it creates a lot of damage, leaving crushed enemy-heads in its wake.
Another, not quite as elusive, Australian native I want to meet is the bogan. Anyone who’s ever met an Australian has heard the expression but I have never seen one in its natural state. I want to meet a bogan and shake its hand.