I’ve been to Australia twice so far, but according to my father I’ve never actually seen it. He made this observation at the home of my cousin Joan, whom he and I visited just before Christmas last year, and it came on the heels of an equally aggressive comment. “Well,” he said, “David’s a better reader than he is a writer.” This from someone who hasn’t opened a book since “Dave Stockton’s Putt to Win,” in 1996. He’s never been to Australia, either. Never even come close.

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

“No matter,” he told me. “In order to see the country, you have to see the country_side_, and you’ve only been to Sydney.”

“And Melbourne. And Brisbane,” I said. “And I have too gone into the country.”

“Like hell you have.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get Hugh on the phone. He’ll tell you. He’ll even send you pictures.”

Joan and her family live in Binghamton, New York. They don’t see my father and me that often, so it was pretty lousy to sit at their table, he and I bickering like an old married couple. Ashamed by the bad impression we were making, I dropped the countryside business, and as my dad moved on to other people’s shortcomings I thought back to the previous summer, and my twenty-three-hour flight from London to Sydney. I was in Australia on business, and because someone else was paying for the ticket, and it would be possible to stop in Japan on the way home, Hugh joined me. This is not to put Australia down, but he’d already gone once before. Then, too, spend that much time on a plane and you’re entitled to a whole new world when you step off at the other end—the planet Mercury, say, or, at the very least, Mexico City. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression.

I hate to admit it, but my dad was right about the countryside. Hugh and I didn’t see much of it, but we wouldn’t have seen anything were it not for a woman named Pat, who was born in Melbourne and has lived there for most of her life. We’d met her a few years earlier, in Paris, where she’d come to spend a mid-July vacation. Over drinks in our living room, her face dewed with sweat, she taught us the term “shout,” as in “I’m shouting lunch.” This means that you’re treating, and that you don’t want any lip about it. “You can also say, ‘It’s my shout,’ or, ‘I’ll shout the next round,’ ” she told us.

We kept in touch after her visit, and when my work was done, and I was given a day and a half to spend as I liked, Pat offered herself as a guide. On that first afternoon, she showed us around Melbourne, and shouted coffee. The following morning, she picked us up at our hotel, and drove us into what she called “the bush.” I expected a wasteland of dust and human bones, but it was nothing like that. When Australians say “the bush,” they mean the woods. The forest.

First, though, we had to get out of Melbourne, and drive beyond the seemingly endless suburbs. It was August, the dead of winter, and so we had the windows rolled up. The homes we passed were made of wood, many with high fences around the back yards. They didn’t look exactly like American houses, but I couldn’t quite identify the difference. Was it the roofs? I wondered. The siding? Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four-burner stove.

“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.

I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?”

I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.”

“And what else?” she asked.

“Health, I guess.”

Hugh’s answer was work.

“And?”

“Just work,” he said.

I asked Pat why she’d cut off her family, and with no trace of bitterness she talked about her parents, both severe alcoholics. They drank away their jobs and credit, and because they were broke they moved a lot, most often in the middle of the night. This made it hard to have a pet, though for a short time Pat and her sister managed to own a sheep. It was an old, beat-up ram they named Mr. Preston. “He was lovely and good-natured, until my father sent him off to be shorn,” Pat said. “When he returned, there were bald patches and horrible deep cuts, like stab wounds, in his skin. Then we moved to an apartment, and had to get rid of him.” She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. “Poor old Mr. Preston. I hadn’t thought about him in years.”

It was around this time that we finally entered the bush. Hugh pointed out the window, at a lump of dirty fur lying beside a fallen tree, and Pat carolled, “Roadkill!” Then she pulled over, so we could take a closer look. Since leaving Melbourne, we’d been climbing higher into the foothills. The temperature had dropped, and there were graying patches of snow on the ground. I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a . . . what, exactly? “A teen-age kangaroo?”

“A wallaby,” Pat corrected me.

The thing had been struck but not run over. It hadn’t decomposed, or been disfigured, and I was surprised by the shoddiness of its coat. It was as if you’d bred a rabbit with a mule. Then there was the tail, which reminded me of a lance.

“Hugh,” I called. “Come here and look at the wallaby.”

It’s his belief that in marvelling at a dead animal on the roadside you may as well have killed it yourself—not accidentally but on purpose, cackling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore, he stayed in the car.

“It’s your loss,” I called, and a great cloud of steam issued from my mouth.

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop. From there we walked down a slight hill, passing a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos, just milling about, pulling worms from the front lawn of a bed-and-breakfast. This was the moment when familiarity slipped away, and Australia seemed not just distant but impossibly foreign. “Will you look at that,” I said.

It was Pat who had made the lunch reservation. The restaurant was attached to a hotel, and on arriving we were seated beside a picture window. The view was of a wooden deck and, immediately beyond it, a small lake. On a sunny day, it was probably blinding, but the winter sky was like brushed aluminum. The water beneath it had the same dull sheen, and its surface reflected nothing.

Even before the menus were handed out, you could see what sort of a place this was. Order the pork and it might resemble a rough-hewn raft, stranded by tides on a narrow beach of polenta. Fish might come with shredded turnips or a pabulum of coddled fruit. The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.

As always in a fancy restaurant, I asked Hugh to order for me. “Whatever you think,” I told him. “Just so long as there’s no chocolate in it.”

He and Pat weighed our options, and I watched the hostess seat a party of eight. Bringing up the rear was a woman in her mid-thirties, pretty, and with a baby on her shoulder. Its back was covered with a shawl, but to judge from the size it looked extremely young—a month old, tops.

Keep it away from the chef, I thought.

A short while later, I noticed that the child hadn’t shifted position. Its mother was running her hand over its back, almost as if she were feeling for a switch, and when the top of the shawl fell away I saw that this was not a baby but a baby doll.

“Psssst,” I whispered, and when Pat raised her eyes I directed them to the other side of the room.

“Is that normal in Australia?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s a grieving thing,” she offered. “Maybe she lost a baby in childbirth and this is helping her to work through it.”

There’s a definite line between looking and staring, and after I was caught crossing it I turned toward the window. On the highest rail of the deck was a wooden platform, and standing upon it, looking directly into my eyes, was what I knew to be a kookaburra. This thing was as big as a seagull, but squatter, squarer, and all done up in earth tones, the complete spectrum from beige to dark walnut. When seen full on, the feathers atop his head looked like brush-cut hair, and that gave him a brutish, almost conservative look. If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers.

When the waitress arrived, I pointed out the window and asked her a half-dozen questions, all of them fear-based. “Oh,” she said, “that bird’s not going to hurt anybody.” She took our orders and then she must have spoken to one of the waiters. He was a tall fellow, college age, and he approached our table with a covered bowl in his hands. I assumed that it was an appetizer, but it seemed instead that it was for the kookaburra. “Would you like to step outside and feed him?” he asked.

I wanted to say that between the wallaby and the baby doll I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath the weight.