Russell, Don, Petra, John, Snoopy and Thomas

By Neil Matthews

Russell the Wombat

Russell was not expecting us.  This might have explained why nobody was around when Helen and I turned up in the grey-blue of a cool Southern hemisphere winter morning. People passed by, parakeets squawked in the trees and a loud public address system went into action to welcome all visitors, but still there was no sign of who we had travelled thousands of miles to see.

We occupied ourselves for an hour or two, drinking tea and observing the penchant of Australians of all ages for pies and chips. The sun tried to break through the veil of clouds as we returned to the meeting place, more in hope than expectation. But our luck was in. Shuffling forward on his stocky low-slung frame, sleep and irritation in his eyes in equal measure, was Russell.

My effusive cry of greeting received no response. This was for two main reasons. Firstly, Russell had never met us. Secondly, he couldn't speak, being a wombat.  You might ask: ‘If you'd never met the wombat, how did you know its name? Is Russell a common name among wombats?’ Well… Helen had been in touch via the internet with a fellow travel enthusiast calling himself Russell the Wombat. Also, the small toy wombats in the superstore near our hotel were, according to their labels, called Russell. So it seems fair enough to me to call a wombat Russell.

In among the Tasmanian devils scurrying up and down tree stumps, the echidnas shuffling through undergrowth like hedgehog impersonators, the tree kangaroo lounging in the branches and the black cockatoo taking umbrage as we photographed other birds (and eventually being included in a self-portrait aka 'selfie'), Russell was not conspicuous. His fur was an unremarkable mixture of browns, his ears pronounced but not prominent and he had no tail to speak of - a useful defence against predators who might try to drag him from his burrow, but not likely to win attention when ring-tailed lemurs were around the corner. To the surrounding soundtrack of squawks and screeches - from small children as well as parrots - he added nothing.  Russell just sat near the front of his pit.

He was never going to be the star of the show.  Most human visitors were too busy realising that the toilets were built directly adjacent to large parrot cages, and trying to deal with the matter in hand while a macaw or hyacinth blue screeched at them.  Or they were listening, rapt, as a keeper told them about the moodiness of the zoo’s two resident giant pandas, who had either just had a row or were wondering for the umpteenth time how to stop humans from thinking that pandas are cuddly, or men in costumes.  Or, in the case of one small child pointing at a wallaby and telling his parent that ‘It’s a kangaroo, Mummy!’, they were confused.

Perversely, all this noise and fuss endeared Russell to me all the more. With so many of his fellow inmates using their bright colours, unusual shapes or motions or loud calling cards to get an audience - yes, Mr Kookaburra, you and your laugh - Russell seemed to be saying: ‘This is me. Take me as I am.’  He was the solid citizen, an unshowy quiet team member who would do what you required of him (as long as it involved digging, or sitting around blinking into the light).  Perhaps, though, Russell's laid-back demeanour reflected the city in which we met him.

Even the Adelaideans’ greatest religious devotions don’t appear to get them too excited.  Adelaide is nicknamed the ‘city of churches’ and its greatest example, St Peter’s Cathedral, sits neatly near the River Torrens.  We ducked inside to admire the eclectic styles of the stained glass windows. It might have been delayed jetlag, but I swear Mickey Mouse stared out at me from one of the modern examples. 

The wooden pews proclaim the names of worthies past, but the building is not so solid in every other respect.  The last major restoration work took place in the 1990s and, according to the ‘Cathedral 150’ literature I found, that left much more to do.  A ‘scoping document’ had led to various steps being agreed, involving a steering committee and a ‘realistic time-line’.  As the close proximity of words and phrases such as ‘steering committee’, ‘scope of the project’ and ‘realistic time-line’ tends to put my mood somewhere between irritated and homicidal, I decided it was time to leave.  We headed down the road towards Adelaide’s other cathedral. 

Adelaide Oval

This one is almost as old, having been built in 1871.  Its recent redevelopment cost AUS$75 million, which put St Peter’s in its place.  This is the Adelaide Oval, a Holy of Holies for those Australians who follow the country’s true religion: sport.  Cricket matches have taken place here for well over a century, with other sports following, making the stadium an equivalent of Lord’s, Wimbledon and Wembley Stadium combined: a strange notion for us English, who tend to prefer our sports stadia not to mix things up in that fashion. 

My interest in the stadium derived from its cricketing heritage.  The sight of sweaty blokes in green vests and white shorts, trying to kick a rugby ball between tall posts while shouting, seemed like sacrilege to me.  This, though, was the season for Aussie Rules football.  If William Webb Ellis had been an Australian, rugby union might have evolved into something like Aussie Rules: a sporting jazz where, if you’re not sure whether to pick the ball up or to kick it, you just make things up as you go along and everyone else lets you.

Every religion has its doubters.  ‘They could have spent the money on the infrastructure,’ said one man we met, with a grimace.  But a good piece of road-building can’t give the type of primal satisfaction that a sporting spectacle can.  Even sceptics like Petra Starke, a local journalist, recognise this.  She tells those who wish to take a pilgrimage to the Oval to ‘Get an advanced planning degree so you can find your seat… it’ll be worth it when you get to the Oval and are faced with 75 different stands with 32 tiers and 61 subsections each…’  If you don’t want to plan but just to turn up, this is Petra’s advice:

1.       Ask someone in an official looking polo shirt where you’re supposed to be.

2.       Find out it’s the opposite side of the stadium from where you actually are. Sigh loudly.

3.       Ignore polo shirt and sit down in a nearby empty row.

4.       Enjoy six seconds of footy before a big hairy bloke asks if you’re friends with Rob, because these are his seats. You are not friends with Rob.

5.       Get told to rack off.

6.       Rack off and head for the Hill.

The Hill does not have seats, but enables you to ‘join forces with 46,000 others in a primal scream that shakes the very heavens… I may not get football, but I definitely get Adelaide Oval’.  The spectacle infects the rest of the city, temporarily overthrowing its default setting of muted respectability.

We weren’t there for a live game of anything or even for one of the concerts the stadium holds from time to time.  We had come to pay homage – or, to be exact, I had come to pay homage and Helen had humoured me by not going off shopping – to a legend, the closest you could get to a sporting god: Don Bradman. 

I knew that the Oval boasted, somewhere on its premises, a selection of items from the Bradman Collection, a mass of Bradmanobilia which the great man had given to the local museum authorities before his death in 2001.  But finding it is a challenge.  Ticket office staff and other visitors were unfailingly polite in their attempts to help us, but none of them seemed to know for sure. The signage gave no clues either, so we wandered around, marvelling at the small size of the ground.  Chattering schoolchildren crocodiled past us.  Nobody stopped or challenged us.  I’m used to the Olympic standard of jobsworthiness of one or two gate staff at Lord’s, who have been known to refuse admission to the captains of national cricket teams, let alone mere spectators.  Here, nobody could care less.

We located the Collection in the end: in a smallish blacked-out space near the main entrance, unremarkable and unremarked.  A traditional exhibition – most of it behind glass – included a replica of Mr and Mrs Bradman’s living room, one of his blazers, one of his bats and some film footage of the Don (as he was known) in action. 

His cricket career is too well known to need lengthy repetition of the details here: the boy who practised by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump against a wall; his move to Sydney in order to improve his chances of selection for Australia’s Test team; the tours of England in the 1930s when he redefined the art of run-scoring; the invention by an England team of Bodyline, the most controversial tactic in cricket history, to stop him; and the triumphant 1948 tour, ended anti-climactically with a duck in his last Test. His final batting average was an anorak’s delight: 99.94, almost forty runs an innings better than anyone else in history.  Bradman’s very talent isolated him from his teammates, bringing fame with which he barely coped and a knighthood which he later said he regretted accepting.  His move to Adelaide in 1934 had twin motives: to take up the captaincy of South Australia and a job in a stockbroking firm.

What struck me was the small scale, understated nature of it all.  One elderly man, whose son was asking if he could remember watching Bradman in person, sat agog at the film footage.  A few other families with small children wandered in a desultory way around the exhibition.  This was, after all, the original Australian sporting hero who slew the colonial masters’ teams for twenty years.  Until recently, to criticize the Don was a little like criticising the Queen: it just wasn’t done. 

A few days later, passing a photo of Bradman in South Australia’s state library, also in Adelaide, a middle-aged woman told her son: ‘That’s Don Bradman, he was one of our best cricketers.’  One of?  It seems Australia has grown beyond those interwar years when it boasted of ‘our [Sydney Harbour] Bridge and our Bradman’.  To adapt Clive James’s comment on Sydney, when Bradman was all they had to see, they couldn’t see him straight; but now they can.  Or perhaps this was what Australians call Tall Poppy Syndrome.  Don’t grow too tall or someone will cut you down to size.  You’ll end up as a suburban stockbroker.  Better to keep your head down. Be a wombat, not a parrot.

Hand-feeding a Kangaroo

One place you definitely can’t be a wombat is Kangaroo Island, just a few hours’ drive south from the city.  Wombats dig a lot, which makes them a nuisance the island has chosen to do without, just as it excludes foxes and dingoes, who eat carrion, which makes it harder for young eagles to find food.  Birdlife is one of the attractions of Kangaroo Island.  At the Wildlife Sanctuary, you can feed kangaroos by hand (for several hours on end if they had their way).  Raptor Domain offers demonstrations of the flight of barn and sooty owls, kestrel, wedge tailed eagles, kookaburras and even a buzzard.

Meanwhile, on the island’s northern coast at Kingscote, John feeds the pelicans.  Some years ago, after fishermen stopped throwing away the waste from their daily catch, John felt sorry that the pelicans were missing out on their feed down at the wharf.  So now he spends around AUS$40,000 a year buying fish, feeding them to the pelicans and recouping the cost through donations from an audience. John’s opinions are trenchant.  He told us that little penguins have been eaten by New Zealand fur seals because ‘The government is too stupid and hopeless to do anything about it – like most governments.’  One pelican had eaten a chihuahua, ‘which should earn it a place in history and our gratitude.  Chihuahuas are shocking, terrible things.’  According to John, ‘all a man needs is a boat and a wife.’  We knew he had the first; we weren’t so sure about the second.

If this all sounds terribly ecologically earnest, the island has a quirky side too.  There are six commercial farms devoted to beekeeping.  Clifford Farm, which we visited, breeds Ligurian bees – the only pure-bred Italian bees left, as bees elsewhere have cross-bred.  The farm exports queen bees by post.  In Penneshaw - your first stop once you get off the ferry from the mainland - Penny’s Restaurant tells diners that ‘All unattended children will receive a free espresso and a kitten to take home.’  At the eucalyptus oil farm on Emu Ridge, the shop will sell you a book of roadkill recipes including Skippy the Bush Vindaloo.

Back in Adelaide, there are plenty of other little touches which will draw a wry smile, a gasp or a giggle. In the South Australian Museum, a giant squid squats across several floors in a stairwell, boggling small boys’ imaginations.  The Ayers House Museum, which marks the life of Sir Henry Ayers from his early days as a legal clerk in England to his days as Premier of South Australia, invites you to look round what became a 44-room mansion with exquisite painted ceilings… and to look out for the replica rat in the kitchen.  In Port Adelaide, a World War II aircraft hangar houses the Aviation Museum, with an 80% size replica of the Red Baron’s plane.  When we visited, the pilot’s seat was occupied by Snoopy. 

Aviation Museum, Port Adelaide

Our trip to the nearby Railway Museum must have coincided with the winter school holidays, as the displays of old locomotives and rolling stock became a backdrop for people dressed as tigers and zebras being chased by a policeman with a large net, while a woman did a version of the Indian rope trick on a platform.  The model railway representing the local area incorporated Thomas the Tank Engine chugging round its track and the Batmobile was parked quietly at a station.  If you have a sweet tooth, a visit to the cheesecake shop in Port Adelaide is a must; and chocoholics won’t want to miss a tour of Haigh’s Factory in Greenside Road, with free samples available.

Adelaide may not have Melbourne’s profile or the glamour of Sydney.  But underneath the air of quiet middle-class respectability, there’s plenty going on. Sometimes it’s not what you expected, like the sunny afternoon that our boat ride on the Torrens took a turn for the dramatic when the captain stopped beneath a bridge to help two young lads rescue a drowning man.  But for the most part the atmosphere is laid back, allowing you to take time over your raisin toast in one of the local cafes, to watch the parakeets in the trees or to linger in the Botanical Gardens, as you get to know this very English Australian city.

First published in VISA 120 (April 2015)