So that was the Bali conference. Tchja. I understand that the attendees received a bit of flak in the media for jetting in on a CO₂ slipstream and staying in needlessly opulent hotels. Well, I don’t know about the delegates, but I think my accommodation was reasonably modest:

I’m joking of course, readers. This is Fremantle prison, Perth, Australia: modelled on Pentonville, built by convicts and furnished by John Pawson:

Forty-four people were hanged here, including Messrs Chew Fang, DeKitchilan Augustin and Miamoor Mohomet. Farewell, chaps. We were told by a former guard that ghosts of prisoners appear in visitors’ photos these days. Hope they haven’t spoiled any wedding pictures – you can get married at the prison if you want (and who wouldn’t?). Indeed, the fearless prison management promise to take on any function: “Why not lighten the mood of a conference and have your guests dress in convict clothes and dine in the main cell block!” Quite so. Perhaps this would be an option in Poznan?

There was much mention of ghosts in Australia – of hanged convicts, asylum patients, unhinged settlers called Satan or McKenzie… That’s a lot of ghosting going on, despite the country being so young. Elke and I visited the oldest building in Perth: a windmill, built in 1835 by an engineer from Winchester called William Shenton. The mill’s age made it freakish. Having survived the threat of demolition, it now stands chalky and white in a sea of glassy new buildings, a little Holland in the middle of Miami. It is not prominent on the tourist map and seemed to be barely visited: when we got to the visitor centre we found the guide slumped asleep over the front desk, probably dreaming of Croydon (where it turned out he was once from). Still, nice querns.

Nothing else seemed half as old for miles around… Nothing else standing in the way of the new housing still being built: a million Barratt Homes and bungalows for Western Australia’s economic boom. Without obvious historical reference points, the buildings seem fluid and limitless, like Vietnamese house boats or Mexican flower barges floating and jostling on the water. On that subject, there are big problems with water (Elke says updates of dam levels have become part of news bulletins), but I am taking a holiday from climate related worries (yes, I know, villagers in Bangladesh or Arctic Canada should be so lucky…). Apparently the state is getting rich by raiding its jewellery box for the Chinese. The mines are up north, where the men are proper Okkers (hope I used that word right), the shifts don’t stop for Christmas and the trucks are so big you wouldn’t even come up to the wheel rim.

 

We left the suburbs to go into The Outback, which was crazy beautiful but a bit spooky, with endless bushland to get lost and/or buried in, Texas Chainsaw Massacre farmsteads and huge trucks straight out of Duel.

 

But the spookiest bit of all was the overwhelming feeling of hugeness and otherness – must be what it’s like for astronauts when space walking. Australia feels like a place where, for once, Progress can be checked. We visited a town called New Norcia, where Benedictine monks had come 150 years ago to save local Noongyar Aborigines from themselves. Which was nice of them. Mission housing and boarding schools have come and gone, and these days, despite the monastery running a successful bakery business, it feels like a failed enterprise. The problem is attracting new monks to stay for long enough. “Some of them come for 10 years but then they go again,” explained our tour guide. Lightweights.

So I found the outback pretty unnerving and felt happier whenever there were forests or wheat fields – anything that reminded me of Europe, probably. But I can’t deny it’s all amazing to look at. I am surprised we didn’t see more people on the roads just for the hell of it, cause it’s all so exciting and Nature-ful. There are oversized plants with leaves like stars or ribbons or African grass skirts, and wicked trees called boabas, which are like unexploded bombs sticking out of the earth with branches like fuse wire.

Then there are the animals. Everything’s… bigger. There are crows, but they’re the size of small children. The magpies look the same as our magpies, except they’re spotted like Dalmatians and nearly as large. I became blasé about pelicans, spoonbills and even the enormous scary black vulture things that hang out on telephone lines waiting for humans to get bitten by some extravagantly bepoisoned snake and become carrion kebab. I saw emus hanging out in fields with cows, koalas slumped like couch potatoes in the branches of eucalyptus trees, and a kangaroo by the side of the road that was either throwing an advanced Astanga yoga move or had been hit very hard by a car. Farewell.

The best bit was kayaking in the sea alongside sea lions (yes, I AM Spartacus!).

 

We were told the sea lions would come up close if we didn’t look them in the eye and pretended they weren’t there. “So you basically mean we have to play hard to get,” said Elke. Well, it was good practice for the Australian bar she took me to (male:female ratio = 10:1). It was super awesome to see the Elkster again, who is still one my favourite people in the world despite persuading me to go to her office Christmas party, but sadly our friendship will have to go back into cryogenesis until I can bring myself to fly on an aeroplane again.

Next stop: Germany!