Purple Trees and Polar Bears

23 October 2009

Since we last spoke, David and I have been drifting down the east coast of Queensland doing not much. It's a good country for doing not much, hot and sunny and chillaxed and spread out. It's hard to believe there are 20 million people here, as approximately 8 appear to live in the Northern Territory, with maybe 30 more in Queensland...in that sense it reminds me a lot of the Flyover parts of the States. You can drive ages and see nothing but corn (in this case, cane—sugar cane), then happen onto a little old town full of gingerbread-houses and petrol stations. Then nothing again. They do have purple trees, though, which exist as if to remind you that you are in fact in a strange and foreign country on the bottom part of the planet.

The birds and flowers are all suitably foreign, actually. Turkey-like things strutting around campgrounds, sickle-billed big white buggers who appear to fear nothing, smaller black-and-white birds that land on your back while you're hunched over assembling gourmet meals in the back of vans. I can quite see why 18th century naturalists thought Australia was a wet dream of a continent—it's all so very different from what's gone before, with no comfortable segue to make it logical. Every third river or town has a woman's name—I trust all the Ediths and Marys and Graces at home in Suffolk or Kent were suitably impressed with the thought of their own personal dry creekbed/mighty river/clearing in the Queensland hinterland, named by a devoted bloke they hadn't actually seen in a good year or seven.



From Rockhampton down a bit to Bundaberg. I wanted to see it because I once read one of my mother's Harlequin romance novels set in Bundaberg (circa 1988, and it was old then); it took me most of the book to figure out that it was set in Australia, as with my typical Amero-centric education it never occurred to me why these people kept calling each other mate. Anyway. Bundaberg is home to the world-famous (in Australia-World and New Zealand-World) rum, called cunningly, Bundaberg Rum. The black-and-yellow package is iconic here (they do like to drink in this country, that is not a cliché), and has a polar bear as it's mascot. Not a local species, no, but when they wanted a mascot to convey that rum will keep you warm in winter, they first considered the only cold-weather animal native to Australia. This is apparently a “Fairy Penguin”. So, no.

We did the factory tour for the bargain price of $25 each—through the molasses shed (9 feet deep in viscous dark brown goo that smells of licorice and sugar), the curing vats, the bottling plant. Then the free drinks. Trust me, $25 is a deal for two drinks in Australia. First: huge rum and coke. Second: Dark & Stormy, a pre-mixed drink of Bundaberg ginger beer and Bundaberg rum....sooooooo nice. This may be my new favourite thing today. Unfortunately, they are something like $26 for a six-pack at the liquor store, and so I will not be drinking many. One last note on the Bundaberg Rum—the secret that gives the rum it's colour and flavour? American White Oak. Yep, 6 tons per vat at a cost of $75,000 each, grown on Bundaberg's plantation in the “Abalution” mountains of West Virgina, which, according to Stephanie the Queenslander tour guide, are on the border with Canada. Americans are not the only charmingly ignorant people on earth when it comes to geography after all!

Once again we stayed in one of Queensland's freebie side-of-the-road rest areas, this one screened from the road by a stand of lacy trees and really very pretty, with toilets and all. Apparently what in Laos is a long-drop in Bundaberg is an 'Eco Toilet.' To be fair, it does have a seat and one doesn't have to look at what has gone before, so to speak, and it doesn't smell at all. I say Australia should forget sending well-drilling equipment and educational supplies and medicine to the third world, and focus instead on exporting these things.