In this love letter to Australia, First Dog on the Moon writes about childhood, Vegemite sandwiches, cricket and the smell of eucalypts in the heat

This is my love letter



to a piece of weather

to an extinct furry animal

to my first memory

to Australia

Hello Australia, I have always loved you.

There isn’t space here to list everything as Australia takes up a lot of space.

I love that my earliest memory of you is the ABC, I am sitting in the kitchen in my childhood home in Bega, Dad is making Vegemite sandwiches for lunch and the ABC news theme comes on the radio. The kettle is boiling. I love the ABC too.

I love standing still in the bush when it is pushing 40 degrees. Nothing moves in the heat, there is a great roaring silence broken only by the slow, solemn tick of the eucalypts. The air is alive and thick with the smell of the gumtrees and the baking earth. The heat swallows you whole and the very air strives to push you into the ground. And with it always, the quiet looming menace of fire.

I love the Greater Stick-nest Rat*. It builds a big stick nest with its friends and they live in it. It is an enormous (almost 30cm long) fat, communal nest-building rat that sits on its hind legs like a bunny. The Lesser Stick-nest Rat**, which I also love, is extinct. They weren’t as big as the Greater Stick-nest Rat, but they would also build large communal nests. They are gone now. So many are gone now.

I love the light. And the clattering honking crunching cheeping rustling roaring sound of it all. Then there are kookaburras***. What a ridiculous and charming bird. We chose the emu**** but there are so many who could/should be our national bird. All of them. We should be governed by sulphur-crested cockatoos*****

I love watching Test cricket. With the sound on the TV off and the ABC radio on.

I’m eating watermelon so cold it hurts my teeth, out the window the sprinkler is on at the wrong time of day but it’s in the backyard so we should be good as long as the neighbours don’t hear it and dob us in – there are water restrictions. (Not a true story of course.)

In these days of patriotism and plastic shopping bags blowing into the sea, the idea that there is an Australian way to do things, means there is an un-Australian way to do things and who has time for that. I do not. The Greater Stick-nest Rat and the kookaburra have no time for that.

Even so I love the people here, people who are at once warm and irreverent and intolerant and full of fear and perhaps a little hope. The broken, bitter, cold and cruel among us. The disempowered and the dispossessed. Each and every one. Most days.

Geez we can be funny buggers though. I love that. And the way we talk, I reckon if the science could work out a way to weaponise an accent, Australian voices could blast a hole in the moon. Yeah nah.

It is not always easy to love you Australia, it is a love that is bright and deep like your slowly poisoned oceans, I am struck down and left speechless so often by the cruelty and seemingly infinite capacity to turn away from the suffering of others, to block people out like we block out the brutal summers. Fearful, mistrustful, stifled and sweating in our lives apart. Claustrophobic and terrified of knowledge and kindness, death.

Did you know that Aboriginal Australians were living in cities of up to 5,000 people before the colonisers came, with storage for grain and farming and aquaculture? It shouldn’t matter if they did or they didn’t, what matters is why don’t we know about it, why don’t we want to know about it? I don’t love that.

I do love our poisonous and venomous animals (not necessarily in person).

I love the giant dinosaur cassowaries****** but the idea of them scares me.

I love sharks.

Funnel-web spiders******* are great.

And public transport, our trams and trains make me want to cheer! Yes, I know that lots of countries have public transport.

But they don’t have this landscape.

Or space.

The light.

The flora.

The fauna.

All of it, except the bits I don’t like.

the wonderful terrible people.

Home.

This is my love letter to Australia.

* (Leporillus conditor)

** (Leporillus apicalis)

*** (Dacelo novaeguineae)

**** (Dromaius novaehollandiae)

***** (Cacatua galerita).

****** (Casuarius casuarius)

******* (Atrax robustus)

This an extract from Letters of Love: Words from the heart penned by prominent Australians, published by Affirm Press in partnership with the Alannah & Madeline Foundation. All profits from book sales go directly to the Alannah & Madeline Foundation