Sydney Stylee!

So we got to Sydney in one piece. As we filled out our immigration forms and watched the threatening customs information videos it became clear that Australia was really serious about bring food, plants, dirt, insects, etc in. I had read Bill Bryson’s excellent book “Down Under” (Thanks Mick!) which went into great detail explaining how Australia had been well and truly screwed up by people who should have known better introducing all kinds of crazy things into the delicate Australian ecosystem.

There was a fella named Thomas Austin who imported 24 wild rabbits and released them in his back garden so he’d have something to shoot at. There was nothing to stop the rabbits and by 1880 they had devoured two million acres of land around Victoria. A century later myxomatosis was introduced and soon there were tens of millions of corpses.

“It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia’s rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast.”

Camels were used to build railways, and were released into the wild when they were no longer needed: there are now 100,000 of them in the Australian deserts.

“Across the country there are five million wild donkeys, a million or more wild horses (called brumbies) and large numbers of water buffalo, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, foxes and dogs . . . the consequences . . . about 130 mammals in Australia are threatened. Sixteen have become extinct . . . And guess what is the mightiest killer of all? . . . the common cat. Cats love the Australian wild. There are 12 million of them out there . . . they have driven many of Australia’s smallest, cutest and most vulnerable native animals to the edge of extinction.”

And it wasn’t just imported animals that caused problems. In the 1850’s Victoria’s chief botanist planted clumps of blackberry everywhere he went.

“The blackberry is now Australia’s most pernicious weed, all but ineradicable and the bane of farmers everywhere. Where unmolested it takes over whole landscapes.”

And when somebody thought it would be a good idea to introduce prickly pear as a potential stock food:

“ For a whole it looked as if much of Queensland and beyond would simply become one Europe-sized bed of pickly pear.”

Luckily they found a moth that ate the leaves.

Sorry for the waffle, but all this was going through my head as we approached the Customs. We had been invited to stay with Rob and Lisa in Sydney until we got our act together and had bought Rob a pretty pathetic wooden pipe thing as a present. We had to declare this in case it’s wood was diseased or infested. We also had Malaysian mountain mud all over our boots which we declared and the nice customs man decided to wash our boots for us rather than incinerate them. “Next time clean your boots before you come into Australia lads, you’re lucky it was Paddy’s Day yesterday.” And off we went. We were expecting all kinds of questions about our visa/money/plans, but we were just told to queue up at a desk and a fella stuck our visas into our passport. That was that. We were in.

We met Rob and Lisa in Sydney central and retired to their apartment for a delicious ice-cold Twohey’s beer and an update of how they were getting on in Oz. I’m happy to say that all news is good, some of it very good indeed! Rob really needs to listen to Lisa more though. (Sorry Rob). They are working hard, making plans and generally doing very well. They were able to fill us in on all the basics for survival and some of the more subtle means of adapting to life in Sydney. They showed us where the train stations were, told us what tickets to buy, Rob drew a map of how to get to the bank/bus stop, Lisa gave us a street map of Sydney and wrote down the grid reference of the bus stop in the city which came back to their house. We were even able to wash our stinking backpacker clothes. To top it all off, Lisa cooked us a big fry on Sunday morning (awkward vegetarians were well catered for). Brilliant.



On Monday, Rob and Lisa were back to work and we were on the hot streets of Sydney trying to get jobs and a place to live. We were half expecting it to be easy or at least a bit fun. It wasn’t at all. It was hard work: plodding around for hours and hours. Ringing estate agents, calling into estate agents, calling ads from newspapers, etc. and generally working hard. We were tired out every night before we got back to Rob and Lisa’s gaff and slept like babies. We heard absolutely nothing about jobs and we saw some really rotten gaffs, some really expensive gaffs and even talked to an estate agent who refused to give us a viewing because we were Irish! The long and the short of it was that we eventually came to the realisation that we weren’t going to be able to get a furnished gaff because we couldn’t sign a long term (6 month +) lease and we weren’t going to get an unfurnished gaff because we would have to get electricity, beds, etc and it just wouldn’t be worth it. Then we focused on places which were furnished and willing to accept short term leases. It came down to three places:

- Gaff One: Some fella from Eastern Europe (Hungary I think) had a gaff about 10 mins drive from the city centre. It was an apartment/house about in an apartment block. It started on the 5th floor and had a kitchen/sitting room downstairs. It had two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a ladder into the attic where there were two more rooms with no windows and sloped ceilings. There was just enough space in our room for two single beds. There were 8 people in the house.
- Gaff Two: This was in Bondi. It was in a nice new apartment block with a balcony overlooking the street. It was a one room kitchen/bedroom type deal with two mattresses and a bathroom/utility room. It was small but nice and so was the girl who was leaving. She was looking for someone to finish the lease. She would leave all the furniture (The mattresses, a chair and the inflatable swimming pool on the balcony. It was tempting.
- Gaff Three: Was right in the middle of the city. Sharing kitchen/living room with others, it was clean and spacious, looked good.

And that was the best we could find, so a decision had to be made. After a bit of toing and froing, we ended up with gaff number three because:

- it was in the city
- it was relatively insect free
- it looked nice

And away we went. Moved in about two weeks after arriving (I think) and Rob and Lisa finally got some peace. Thanks Rob! Thanks Lisa!