Just add Water ...

After gathering and digesting the pre-trip information about the South and West coast of Australia from a safe distance (a living room in Brooklyn, NY), it looks like the biggest challenges during this month long trip may be mastering the landings due the possible large size of the surf, avoiding encounters with sharks and snakes (8 out of the 10 world's most venemous snake species are residing in Australia), and paddling a 70 miles/16 hour paddling leg between Augusta and Windy Harbor, with no landing sites inbetween due to high cliffs. My thanks go to Kelvin Lewis and John Di Nucci who helped so much getting this trip together and from whom I will receive the 3-piece Nigel Dennis Explorer which I will paddle on this trip. Lucky me: Both Kelvin and John will join me for a couple of days during this trip.
Until I will finally set my foot out of the aluminum tube at Perth airport this coming February, my knowledge about Australia is mostly based out of Paul Caffyyn's book "Dreamtime Voyage", and Bill Bryson's book "In a Sunburned Country". The subject of the conversations below is from the book "In a Sunburned Country", and tells about the author's favorite topic: The dangerous animals of Australia - and how the Australiens rate the actual danger of being involved in hazards caused by encounters with species. From Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country": "This [conversation about crocodiles with an Australien] led to a fond recollection of other near-death experiences with animals, of which Australiens always have a large fund - an encounter with a crocodile in Queensland, killer snakes nearly stepped on, waking up to find a redback rappelling on a thread towards's one face. Australiens are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there is nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six month ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudge when a tiger shark slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that's okay now because he is off the life support machine and they have discovered he can communicate with eye blinks."
"But all of these are nothing [Bill Bryson just went on and on about highly venemous creatures such as the tiger snake, the desert death adder, the yellow bellied sea snake and the taipan snake] compared with the delicate and diaphanous box jellyfish, the most poisonous creature on earth. We will hear more of the unspeakable horrors of this little bag of lethality when we get to the tropics, but let me offer here just one small story. In 1992 a young man in Cairns, ignoring all the warning signs, went swimming in the Pacific waters at a place called Holloways Beach. He swam and dove, taunting his friends on the beach for their prudent cowardice, and then began to scream with an inhuman sound. It is said that there is no pain to compare with it. The young man staggered from the water, covered in livid whiplike stripes wherever the jellyfish's tentacles had brushed across him, and collapsed in quivering shock. Soon afterward emergency crews arrived, inflated him with morphine, and took him away for treatment. And there's the thing. Even unconscious and sedated, he was still screaming."

3. The Dreamtime

 
To the Aborigines, the "Dreamtime" describes the time of creation of their native land and the moulding of the people with clay by their creators. The traditional way of life, and the social and cultural heritage were created in this Dreamtime. According to the teachings of the Dreamtime, the land is covered with a labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as "Dreaming-Tracks" or "Songlines". To the Aboriginals they are the "Footprints of the Ancestors" or the "Way of the Law". To understand the concept of Dreamtime, you have to understand it as an equivalent of the first 2 chapters of Genesis, but with one significant difference: In Genesis, God first created the living things and then fashioned Father Adams from clay. In Australia, the ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species. An aboriginal from the Wallabi clan believes he has descended from a universal Wallabi Father, who was the ancestor of all other Wallaby Men and of all living wallabies. Wallabies, therefore, were his brothers. To kill one for food was both fracticide and cannibalism. Each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have a scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dream-tracks lay over the land as "ways" of communication between the most far-flung tribes. This way, a song is both a map and a direction finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country. In theory, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. 
 

There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every sacred site was readable in terms of geology. Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask an Aboriginal with you "what's the story there?". Chances are, he will answer "Kangaroo" or "Lizard", dependig on which Ancestor walked that way. The distance between two such sites is then be measured in a stretch of a particular song. By singing the world in existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning "creation". No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was inany way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went "walkabout" was making a ritual journey. He trod the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation. Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see and sing it -just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sung it. In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die. Before the whites came, no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of Ancestor's song and with that the stretch of country over which the song passed. A man's verses were his title deeds to territory. He cold lend them to others, and he could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he could not do was to sell or get rid of the songs or the land.

4. Related Literature

- "Dreamtime Voyage" Around Australia Kayak Odyssey, by Paul Caffyn. Tells the story of Paul Caffyn's 12 month kayak circumnavigation of Australia in 1982. A classic.

- "The Songlines", by Bruce Chatwin, author of In Patagonia

- "In a Sunburned Country", by Bill Bryson

- "Australia", Lonely Planet Guide

21 foot,  3 ton shark

5. Australian-English Dictionaire

I am sure my that after my departure from Australia, my Australien kayaking friends added similar features about my funny way to speak "their" English to their websites or blogs. Here a sample of my favorite Australien idioms, besides the friendly "G'day Mate!" and "Good on'ya!".


A "Stubbie" - is a bottle of beer,

a "Tinnie" - is the same ingredient in a can, and
the "Eski" - is the cooler to store it in

"Ute" - four wheel drive, usually extremely rugged & rusty. A shiny SUV does not count for a Ute.

"Thongs" - sandals

"Gentlemen's paddle" - A day paddle interrupted every 10 to 20 minutes by a 20 to 40 minute tea break. Note: At a true "Gentleman's Paddle", tea will be also brewed & served shortly before launch, and immediately after landing. Without the pre-launch and after-landing teas, the paddle would not qualify as a "gentleman's paddle", and thus would considered to be a "mindless race".