Diary of a Pom in Western Australia

I got forwarded this a while back and thought it was too funny (and close to the truth) not to post.

August 31

Just got transferred with work from Leeds UK to our new home in Karratha, Western Australia. Now this is a town that knows how to live! Beautiful, sunny days and warm, balmy evenings. I watched the sunset from a deckchair by our pool yesterday. It was beautiful. I’ve finally found my new home. I love it here.

September 13

Really heating up now. It got to 31 today. No problem though. Living in air-conditioned home, driving air-conditioned car. What a pleasure to see the sun every day like this. I’m turning into a sun-worshipper – no blasted rain like back in Leeds!!

September 30

Had the back yard landscaped with tropical plants today. Lots of palms and rocks. No more mowing lawns for me! Another scorcher today, but I love it here. It’s Paradise!

October 10
The temperature hasn’t been below 35 all week. How do people get used to this kind of heat? At least today it’s windy though. Keeps the flies off a bit. Acclimatizing is taking longer than we expected.

yutiyr

October 15
Fell asleep by the pool yesterday. Got third degree burns over 60% of my body. Missed three days off work. What a dumb thing to do. Got to respect the old sun in a climate like this!

yutiyr

October 20
Didn’t notice Kitty (our cat) sneaking into the car before I left for work this morning. By the time I got back to the car after work, Kitty had died and swollen up to the size of a shopping bag and stuck to the upholstery. The car now smells like Whiskettes and cat shit. I’ve learned my lesson though: no more pets in this heat.

October 25
This wind is a bastard. It feels like a giant fucking blow dryer. And it’s hot as hell! The home air conditioner is on the blink and the repair man charged $200 just to drive over and tell me he needs to order parts from fucking Perth ….The wife & the kids are complaining.

October 30
The temperature’s up around 40 and the parts still haven’t arrived for the fucking air conditioner. House is an oven so we’ve all been sleeping outside by the pool for 3 nights now. Bloody $600,000 house and we can’t even go inside. Why the hell did I ever come here?

November 4
Finally got the fucking air-conditioner fixed. It cost $1,500 and gets the temperature down to around 25 degrees, but the humidity makes it feel about 35. Stupid repairman. Fucking thief.

November 8
If one more smart bastard says ‘Hot enough for you today?’ I’m going to fucking throttle him. Fucking heat! By the time I get to work, the car radiator is boiling over, my fucking clothes are soaking fucking wet and I smell like baked cat. Fucking place is the end of the Earth.

November 9
Tried to run some errands after work, wore shorts, and sat on the black leather upholstery in my car. I thought my fucking arse was on fire. I lost 2 layers of flesh, all the hair on the backs of my legs and off my fucking arse. Now the car smells like burnt hair, fried arse and baked cat. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

November 10
The Weather report might as well be a fucking recording. Hot and sunny. Hot and sunny, Hot and fucking sunny. It never fucking changes! It’s been too hot to do anything for 2 fucking months and the weatherman says it might really warm up next week. Fuck!

November 15
Doesn’t it ever rain in this damn fucking place? Water restrictions will be next, so my $5,000 worth of palms might just dry up and blow into the fucking pool. The only things that thrive in this fucking hell-hole are the fucking flies. You don’t dare open your mouth for fear of swallowing half a dozen of the little bastards!

November 20
Welcome to HELL! It got to 45 fuckin’ degrees today. Now the air conditioner’s gone in my car. The repair man came to fix it and said, ‘Hot enough for you today?’ I wanted to shove the fucking car up his fucking arse. Anyway, had to spend the $2,500 mortgage payment to bail me out of jail for assaulting the stupid prick. Fucking Karratha! What kind of sick, demented fucking idiot would want to live here!

December 1
WHAT!!!! The FIRST day of Summer!!!! You are fucking kidding me!

tyutiyr

How to fly round the world and survive

k

Normally the worst thing about a holiday (apart from flying with small children) is when it comes to an end. But when you have to fly all the way back around the world just to arrive at your own front door, it’s even worse. A healthy dose of jet lag is enough to make you look and feel like you’ve never even been away.

Our epic trip began last Sunday – starting with the pleasure of a two and a half hour trip on a jam-packed National Express coach, where I passed the time pinning a hyper 3 year-old to his seat and listening to the woeful bleating of a driver who felt his job description shouldn’t actually involve any driving. Especially on a Sunday.

Next came the lipstick coated power freak at check-in, who demanded we extract 2kgs worth of stuff from one ‘too heavy for the conveyor belt’ suitcase. Have conveyor belts suddenly grown weaker over the years or are they now simply exercising their civil rights? The 2 kg was of course simply added to the already overloaded hand luggage. Right there on the floor. In front of the power freak. The logic of this blatant redistributing is lost on me.

Having already completed the lengthy flight at the start of the holiday, what now lay ahead of us was hardly much of a surprise. But, just like child-birth, the mind has a habit of erasing the true extent of the ordeal involved, just to make sure that you will ever contemplate doing it again. Quite a handy thing, when you have a return ticket to use up.

For the first 11 hours I sat wedged between 2 children – covered in the crumbs of a rock-hard bread roll and wrapped from head-to-toe in the wires of 6 headsets. Why we even had 6 I’m not sure, there were, after all, only 4 of us.

As a flying parent you are faced with 2 possible scenarios, neither of which it has to be said are particularly pleasant.

The first option is to make the most of each and every inch of your seat, and to achieve the maximum level of comfort – granted, this isn’t much, given the blood clot inducing foetal position you are now in, with your knees wedged into your rib cage and your feet tucked into the magazine holder in front. This does however allow for the possibility of a few hours sleep for yourself, if the restless and wriggling children on either side of you would allow it. Which, as a general rule, they don’t.

The second option – the more selfless and painful one – is relinquish both arm rests and allow your uncomfortable children to stretch themselves out across both your seat and your lap. So resigning yourself to the knowledge that you will get no rest at all. Like I said, neither option is designed to really appeal.

I went with the second, though more out of necessity than choice I admit. When faced with a choice between crying, whingeing children, and a mind-numbing night of pain, I opted for the lesser of 2 evils.

By the time we had located our lost stroller at Hong Kong airport, walked several kms through duty free (without even getting within sniffing distance of any shopping), gotten lost and caught the necessary train to find our connecting flight, I was quite happy to snap the head off the unhelpful ground staff who told us off for being late. If I’d had the energy or a free hand I’d have smacked him round the face. Like I said, I was tired.

Within minutes of the next plane taking off I went into self-preservation mode, pulled on the blindfold and went to sleep – until I felt the eyes of my tired husband boring into me, so resigned myself to waking up and giving him a chance to pass out.

Arriving back in Perth would have been a welcome relief, if we’d actually come back to the comfort of our own home. But we couldn’t and we didn’t.  Instead we had to stay in a hot and basic rental for a week, battling jet lag and fighting flies. With mornings starting around 2.30am, 2 over-tired kids to entertain and no car to even escape the cabin fever, I think it’s safe to say the end of the holiday was far from perfect.

Post holiday blues wouldn’t even begin to cover how I felt. I was in a completely different colour spectrum all together.

k

k

Fighting Flies

Having spent the entire day armed with an aerosol can and stalking flies around the house like a mad woman with a nervous tick, I have decided that enough is enough. Having already lost the last 3 months of my life to the debilitating effects of vertigo, there is no way on God’s earth that I am now going to put up with a constant buzzing in my ear that I can do something about.

So tonight I brought out the big guns. Envirosafe traps, ($10 from Bunnings). A quick and easy (just add water to the powder and shake sort of easy) way of catching the little buggers as they buzz in the kitchen door and head straight for my clean work top.  Their presence might be slightly more tolerable if not for the fact that right before they trample their mucky little feet across whatever it is that I happen to be eating at the time, they have been out in the garden and feasting on a buffet of the dogs finest deposits.

Strangely enough the idea of the dogs last dinner ending up smeared across my plate is an incredibly unappetising one.

After last year’s endless battle against these airborne pests, I am determined that this year I will be ready for them. If it’s the last thing I manage this spring, it will be winning the war against the world’s most pointless and annoying insect and hopefully coaxing as many of them as possible into the various watery graves hung around the house.

I am aware that this may make me sound like a blood thirsty insect murderer, and a slightly possessed one at that, but in my defense this is the effect that an endless buzzing drone in ones ear can have on an otherwise peace loving girl.

It may be ridiculous to let something so small wind me up so much, but they do. They really do. They are almost impossible to catch, swat or squash and can literally drive you up the wall when trying to coax one back out through an open window. I suppose their ‘you’ll never catch me’ razor sharp reactions have something to do with those 2 large compound eyes that let them see in all directions without even needing to move.

These eyes mean that unfortunately it is pointless trying to sneak up slowly on a fly from behind. It will watch you, laugh at you and then nip across the room and land on your half eaten sandwich before you have even lifted up the newspaper to swat it.

Strangely enough although flies have these clever, swiveling eyes to help prevent themselves from being flattened against the wall, they don’t actually have any eyelids to protect them. So although they spend much of their time tiptoeing through rubbish, rotting meat and dog do-do, they then have to rub their own eyes with their dirty feet to keep them clean. I wonder if this is natures way of enforcing karma?

Flies come from the Diptera family (Greek: di = two, and pteron = wing), which includes all those annoying insects with wings (namely flies, mosquitoes and midges) whose sole purpose in life seems to be to carry germs, spread diseases, chow down on unsavory things on the ground and generally ruin any attempt to ever sit and relax outside or eat the food you have just charcoal-ed on the BBQ.

Apparently there are 30 000 species of Diptera that live in Australia alone. At a rough estimate I would say for a handful of weeks in the year at least half of these species seem to dwell in our back garden.

I was aware that Perth had something of a fly problem before I came, (the fly screens on all of the doors and windows were a subtle clue) but when it comes to forces of nature, seeing is definitely believing. All I can say is I am very glad that I didn’t arrive right in the middle of the ‘fly’ season last year, otherwise I might just have packed up my bags and returned to the UK. That last statement is a real indication of how bad they can get, as nothing would make me want to go back to a country that is disappearing down the toilet.

The worst time in Perth is in the Spring, around about now, hence the traps and the war cry. At this point the weather warms up and all those 1000′s of nasty flies wake up ready to do battle. I say wake up because flies can actually remain dormant until their body temperature reaches 18 degrees, they then emerge to begin their hunt for food when the air temperatures goes above 20 degrees.

For that (relatively) short time of the year when they first appear, this place can be a nightmare. Forget the spiders being an issue, the flies are without doubt the single most annoying part of Australia’s wildlife that you need to contend with. They can make going out for a walk a monumental struggle against gravity. The amount of flapping you have to do with your arms and hands is enough to make your feet leave the ground.

This constant flapping about your face and person is known as the ‘Australian Salute’. Having a third hand at this time would be very useful, to push off that one fly that has decided to make you it’s buddy for the day and follow you for hour.

Everywhere you go you can see people walking around in the throes of what looks like a fully fledged epileptic fit. Worse still for those mothers pushing prams. If they use one hand to swat a fly then they run the risk of junior veering off under the wheels of a car, if they keep both hands on the buggy then they are forced to eat fly. Babies are OK, they are all hidden from view under what looks a lot like an Arabic abaya/jilbab. A Factor 50 sunshade that also doubles up as a moving fly screen.

So to save myself the stress brought on by the inevitable aerial attack, this year I have decided that for the worst weeks I will not worry about forcing the kids out for fresh air and exercise. We will instead stick the dog on a treadmill, stay on the safe side of the fly screen and burn calories on the Wii.

I might also invest in one of those famous cork hats. Finally I realise that it might just be worth looking like an extra off ‘Crocodile Dundee’ if it meant that my diet wasn’t supplemented with quite so much unwanted protein.

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Who’s afraid of the big bad spider

One of the things that I think most people worry about when coming to live here is whether they are going to come face to foot with an 8 legged killing machine the moment they set foot on Aussie soil.

First off, to determine whether you can actually handle living in a country with some of the world’s most deadly spiders, answer the following question.

If you answered B or C then you will do just fine. If you answered A, then you are without a shadow of a doubt a fully fledged arachnophobic, and would do best to give this country a wide berth.

So what is fact and what is over hyped fiction about Perth’s 8 legged lovelies and are they really as scary as their reputation suggests?

Fact. There are some species of spiders here that do have a deadly nip about them, some that can cause flesh to rot and some that could probably induce a heart attack if you should ever come face to face with one when climbing out of the shower.

Fiction. It is highly unlikely that you will often come into contact with such spiders and even less likely that you will be charged down by such a man eating monster, with fangs at the ready and a body the size of a small elephant, as you wander through the shopping malls and quiet streets of suburbia.

The most ‘infamous’ of all spiders here in WA is the ‘Red back‘, with a body no bigger than a 5p coin and its distinctive red stripe on the females back (the male is back all over). The bite can apparently be nasty, excruciating if the female in question happens to be pregnant. That can be understood and forgiven, pregnancy can bring out the worst in anything.

While they are deadly, these spiders seldom venture inside the house, preferring dark, damp places like sheds, garages or piles of logs. An antidote is available from pharmacies should you be bitten and more reassuringly still, there hasn’t been a death since 1953.

The other spider in question, and probably the one that worries me more is the ‘White-tail‘ , a small spider with a cigar-shaped body and a white tip. They have a very painful bite and their venom can literally rot away your flesh if not treated in time. Babies and old people are more at risk, but once again, an antidote is readily available and while they do sometimes venture indoors, they will not actively hunt you down to attack. Leave them alone and they won’t bother you.

If you are wondering “But how will I know if one has bitten me?”, then I think it can safely be said that you WILL know. The pain level is meant to be up there with childbirth (so a male doctor claimed). So I don’t think a bite would be something you would overlook until it’s too late and all of the meat on your leg left has fallen off the bone. If in doubt, take yourself off to the pharmacy/doctor/hospital and tell them something with 8 legs bit you.

The ‘Wolf‘ and the ‘Huntsman‘ spiders are not dangerous, except if you are prone to high blood pressure and panic attacks. The Huntsman in particular can grow up to the size of a small child’s hand. While I would certainly never want one around the house, they are in fact great for having about as they eat red backs and other annoying insects. Personally I think I would prefer to invest in some bug spray rather than have a house guest that is big and hairy enough to require it’s own set of towels and a face flannel.

A few years ago a Huntsman spider actually caused a pile up on the freeway in Perth. When a woman lowered her sun visor to block the sun in her eyes and had one fall out and land on her, she understandably freaked out, lost control of her car and crashed. – Note to self, must tap my visor several times before getting in the car.

So yes, these spiders that you have heard about are out there, but more often than not they are out of sight and out of mind. Unless you live out in the bush or in a more rural setting, you will rarely see anything that might cause you any grievous bodily harm. The same goes for the snakes.

It is actually the mere idea of these spiders that can be far more scarier than the reality.

When you first arrive you tell yourself that you will check under every toilet seat and sofa cushion and never put on a shoe without beating it half to death against a wall.

After a bit however you start to relax and eventually get to a stage where you merely study the web briefly (a red back’s web is very ‘messy’) before you hang out the washing next to it, shake your gardening gloves before putting them on and occasionally wash your hair with one eye open, should that watching spider suddenly take it upon itself to jump under the water with you and start loofahing down with your exfoliating shower gel.

Of course I know they are out there. That much is evident by the large number of webs that appear daily around our garden. One web out by our drive stretched out a good metre and a half between 2 trees. It looked just about strong enough to ensnare next door’s cat. Wishful thinking on my part, bloody thing mercilessly teases the dog, makes him bark and gives me a headache.

Now I know for a fact that this particular spider is fairly hefty in size, as it went through a stage of base jumping out of the tree every night and using my car wing mirror as a landing point. When returning home one night I caught the spider in the headlights ‘mid jump’ and was forced to crawl across the car and out of the passenger door to avoid a face to face meeting.

On the upside, these webs that drape my window and door frames like old fashioned net curtains, make brilliant fly and insect catchers. After spending a Spring in Perth I have quickly learned to make firm friends with any creature that includes ‘fly’ in it’s diet.

Just one more interesting spidery fact.

The most poisonous spider of all in WA is actually one that we have in our houses all the time, swinging from the coving and light fittings and never causing us a moments alarm. The ‘Daddy Long-Legs’ (similar to a UK version but with no wings) is, believe it or not, the most venomous of all. But with fangs too blunt to pierce through human skin it is rendered completely harmless.

Just as well really, otherwise I would have to make more of an effort with the dusting, something that I seldom ever find the time to do.

Cooked to perfection

Anyone planning to move Perth and pass their days rotating slowly on a beach towel like a rotisserie chicken should think again. Forget the myths about safe tanning – the sun is not your friend.

Over exposing your pale and vulnerable flesh to the harsh Australian sun, can and will leave you burnt to a crisp, not unlike a piece of blackened rump steak on the barbie. And just as that burnt steak can be a carcinogenic, so too can obsessive sun worshiping fast track you straight into the nearest oncology department.

Sunbathing here can equal baking – in a 40 degree fan forced oven. So unless you fancy looking like a Sunday joint in a roasting tin, then I’d suggest you think more along the lines of spray tans and bronzing balls, than lapping up the UV rays in your bikini.

Admittedly it does seem odd that in a country famed for it’s buffed lifeguards and beach life image, many people choose to stay away from beaches during the summer months. Unlike Brighton or Bournemouth on an August Bank Holiday, where pink flesh is laid out row after row, on a public holiday here many of the beaches are virtually deserted. As a socially phobic beach goer who doesn’t like having to suck my stomach in for long periods of time or listening to someone else’s music, I see this as a bonus.

There are some who will always buck this trend and lay out in the sun, regardless of how high the temperature gets. These include dogs and cats, tourists (who have limited time to achieve their holiday tan) and the older, die hard sunbathing fanatics. These in particular are easily distinguished by their rhino hide skin and the overpowering aroma of pork crackling that surrounds them.

It is not until you experience the sheer heat of the midday sun (particularly in the summer months) that you realise sun cream should never be just an after thought or something that you put on if you find the time. Sun cream is something you put on every time you come into contact with fresh air – whether you’re going for a walk, spending a morning at the beach or just mooching around in your own backyard.

Actually from painful experience I have learnt the hard way that your own garden is possibly the easiest place of all to get burnt. This can happen when you pop outside ‘just for 5 mintues’ to tidy up something in the garden. 6 hours later, after an impromptu full scale pruning operation, you look in the mirror and find yourself to be the same vibrant shade as Elmo and limited to loose, bag shaped clothes for the rest of the week.

The sheer size of the hole in the Ozone right above our heads is reflected in both the human and financial toll that it is taking on society. Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, accounting for around 80% of all new cancers diagnosed each year. Australians are four times more likely to develop a common skin cancer than any other form of cancer, a fact reflected in the 380,000 people treated everyday – over 1,000 people a day, and the 1,600 deaths that are a result of this. Skin cancer also costs the health system around $300 million annually, the highest cost of all cancers.

Such high numbers indicate the extreme severity of this problem – a problem that the Australian government does not take lighty. As well as the gruesome shock tactics press and TV ads that appear during the summer months, the ‘Slip, Slap, Slosh’ sun wise campaign is promoted everywhere that you turn.

This highlights the recommended methods of protection – SLIP on a top, SLAP on a hat and SLOSH on some cream. In addition, it is also recommended to wear wrap around glasses and stay in the shade during the hottest part of the day.

Keeping children creamed and covered up is especially important. Exposure to the sun in childhood and adolescence is an important factor in the development of skin cancer later in life. For children here, learning to put on cream is just a way of life and if they don’t have their hat at schools, they won’t be allowed to play outside. New born babies in particular shouldn’t be out in the sun at all. Most people use black UV nets over their prams – also good for keeping pesky flies away.

So if the dangers of sunbathing are so high, why has having a tan long been associated with wealth, health and superficial good looks?

Long before the Hiltons, Lohans and Jordons of this world began worshiping at the temple of St. Tropez, people believed that having a tan indicated good breeding and class – and the money to be able to travel.

A recent onslaught of budget airlines allowing anyone with a passport and an overdraft limit to fly, has well and truly knocked that perception on the head. On the contrary now, being a similar shade to an Umpa Lumpa is now a trait associated with the countless wannabe stars of the tabloids and celebrity magazines.

The perception that a ‘tan = wealth’ has however always been one reserved solely for the Western word. In Asia, it is a pale skin that is deemed more beautiful, with ‘whitening’ not self tanning creams in hot demand.

Unfortunately with so many models still promoting a sun kissed ‘healthy’ glow on the pages of glossy women’s magazines, the use of a tan remains a fashion accessory. An accessory that destroys your skin. How ironic that whilst tanning may give you an outer appearance of good health, it can also kill.

Not wanting to be seen to be promoting this health risk, many beauty companies do go into overdrive in the summer months, with their ‘responsible’ advertising of their safer, self tanning products. But don’t these just further enforce the idea that brown is still best? If big cosmetic companies really wanted to save people’s skins, then like on cigarette packets, they would advertise the terrible risks of sunbathing with hard hitting photos of melanomas, along side the sun creams they sell. But I’m guessing that stomach churning imagery doesn’t really help to shift beauty products of the shelves.

Having grown up in a succession of sunny climates, I know I have already fried my way through countless layers of skin, in the search of the perfect tan. Back in my teens and early 20’s, the mission was to get as brown as humanly possible, without actually having to undergo an ethnic transplant. Whether that meant dousing myself in Hawaiian Tropic or laying in a pool of my own sweat on a human griddle for half an hour at time, there was nothing I was not naively prepared to do. Back then, being pale did not equate to being beautiful, it simply meant you were coming down with the flu.

It has taken me a long, long time to finally get it into my head that having that ‘oh another half an hour won’t kill me’ mentality is really just playing Russian roulette with your health. The older I get and the more rigorous I am with the L’Oreal Wrinkle Decrease every night (which incidentally does exactly what it says on the tin), the more stupid it seems to then go out the next morning and undo all that hard work.

It has also taken a long time for the world to start pulling together to face up to this issue. One big step in the right direction will be taken at The 12th World Congress on Cancers of the Skin, held in Israel in May 2009. Dermatologists, plastic surgeons and oncologists from around the world will come together to learn about and discuss the latest breakthroughs in the world of cancer.

Until a cure is hopefully one day found, ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse when it comes to the sun. If you live somewhere where the risks run higher and you don’t slap on your slop, you will be treated like an masochistic idiot who ultimately deserves the consequence’s they might face. Unlike many others, this is one disease that can be prevented with a little common sense. So using some is essential.

If after reading this you still can’t resist lying out in the sun for hours, then here’s a way to achieve the same look in half the time. Simply baste yourself down with some good quality virgin olive oil, roll around in some fresh herbs and chuck yourself onto the barbie. It’s always been a look that’s worked well for a chicken drumstick, and at the end of the day cooked meat is just cooked meat.

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