G’day Mate! I can’t get enough of the Australian accent. I think listening to it is my new addiction. It’s such a strange and exciting take on the English language with its variable cadence and unique word inflections. Its strangeness invokes involuntary giggles because it’s so different from what I’m used to, taking my brain a few tries to catch on and calibrate to the new language style.
Much like the people, the birds raise a cacophony of foreign calls. It’s a symphony of sounds that have rarely touched my ears prior. Every morning is drenched in such variety of bird song, ranging from the sound of badly played wind instruments to beautiful lullabies, and every sort of mimicry in between – some sound like monkeys calling from within the depths of jungle foliage and some like street cats loudly mewling for attention. It’s a platter of ornate and novel sounds that simultaneously intrigue and harm my delicate eardrums. The main sound stakeholders are birds like Rosellas, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, the Noisy Miner, the Gray Butcherbird, the Rainbow Lorikeet, the Silvereye, the Eurasian Blackbird, and the iconic Kookaburra.
And then there’s the air… a platter of pleasantly foreign floral smells. Bursts of eucalyptus, mint, sweet floral, all mixed in with an underlying spicy, earthy undertone. My nose has to create a whole new dictionary for what it’s smelling.
It feels like all of a sudden, everything’s on loud volume – the colours, smells, sounds. Before, I’d been living within a colourblind palette, and now suddenly, I feel as if I’ve discovered a whole new fresh wave of senses – as if I’ve unlocked the rest of the colour spectrum with speakers on full volume. Perhaps a little taste of maybe what Charles Darwin might’ve experienced when landing on the Galapagos?
Smooth barked trees with plate-sized leaves. Frills and fronds in every shade of green. Plants and trees defying the laws of gravity and taking the shapes of altered evolutionary paths. Without a need to shutdown for a snowy sub-zero winter has given plants a creative license to defy preconceived growth limitations in pursuit of unparalleled biodiversity.
