Welcome to ChezGigi.com!

  • Subscribe to the site and I promise never to reveal your personal info to anyone. Unless your mom calls and says she hasn't heard from you in three weeks. Then, you're on your own. You should call your mom. Write your name and email and we can be BFFs.  Blog Friends Forever.
 
 

Australia and Me: The Dingo Was My Baby

Australia and Me would be an awesome title to a book if I ever get around to writing it. But I don’t remember all the details of our sojourn in Australia. There are a few years between then and now.

We moved to Australia when I was 12. I’m two degrees from being a gypsy. My parents were gypsies, so it must be genetic. I’d be able to prove this, if my genes didn’t keep packing up their stuff and moving.

In the 1960’s Australia was searching for people to move to their country and be productive citizens. There was a flood of immigration to the US in the 80’s, but rarely do countries actively invite strangers to their shores.

Australia and me on Chezgigi.com
Kununnura

My father took Australia up on its offer to become a modern pioneer, settle in the Outback, and become a blooming citizen. He had retired from the Air Force, earned his helicopter pilot’s license, and flew small aircraft. He and a partner were going to start a crop dusting business.

It fell to my mother to hold down the fort at home with four kids and after two years of uninterrupted single motherhood, she packed us all up, we boarded a Quantas flight and flew off to New South Wales. I remember Sydney Harbor very well; looming in the distance was the Opera House, shooting off what looked like shark fins for a roof, just a skeleton then, and for a long while after our arrival. They, whoever they were, didn’t have the money to finish it.

What’d I tell you? Circling sharks.

After a suitable interval of getting to know Dad again, we set out for Kununurra, a tiny town in Western Australia that looked just like the town where Crocodile Dundee lived when he wasn’t wrestling crocodiles.

Crocodiles were as elusive around Kununurra as the black sambas were in Africa during layovers with Pan Am. Cougars in northern California were scarce during the two years my son and I lived there, and so was the black bear in Colorado where I lived for two years and hiked frequently with my infant son in a pack on my back.

I never wanted to see any of them, but hearing stories and being warned about them tended to put a damper on my enthusiasm for the outdoors. My subconscious is making up for it now; every now and then I’ll have a horrendous dream about wild animals, dreams where even monster fish are featured.

My father saw crocs; saltwater crocodiles that were in excess of thirty feet long. He also brought us fire opals of all sizes; they were abundant in the Outback and could be scooped up like any other stone.

In Kununurra we lived in a small house that was set off the ground on pilings, as protection from floods. The streets were hard-packed dirt and not paved with gold.

The buildings looked as if they had been lifted straight off a Universal set. There appeared to be a population of just three people, two of them men, eying my sister and me rather hungrily. I was very young, and was never approached by any man while there, and I can only think it must have been my father who was setting those female-starved men straight.

On the other hand, puberty was not very kind to me and might have offered me natural protection from predators. I had untweezed eyebrows and I was kind of ugly. I discovered later that the population of Kununurra was actually about 700 and included women and girls.

It was a perfect playground for barefoot boys and girls. There wasn’t any traffic, few roads, and a stranger would be noticed within minutes. There were other kids there; all of them Australian, settling with their parents in the Outback on ranches and farms.

It was their fields my father had come to spray. We explored without restriction, and never ran into trouble. I do remember climbing a mountain, and being too afraid to climb down. I still have that problem, come to think of it. I have no problems climbing high, I am just fearful about getting down. By dint of scooting on my butt, I can make it back from anywhere.

The MOTH and I once explored a Conservation Corps viaduct or something that had been built in the Forties out in the desert. We climbed up it and the MOTH just be-bopped on tap shoes right across the ledge which was about forty feet above the ground. I had to sit down and scooch across.

School was non-existent in Kununurra; kids took correspondence courses. We would be on our way back to New South Wales before it became necessary for us to start school.

Moving to New South Wales, the equivalent of moving across the United States twice, but still closer to my dad than when we were in the States, was my mother’s doing. She didn’t relish using a wringer washer, or living in a primitive house with four kids underfoot who would need to go to school via correspondence course.

Grocery stores in Kununurra numbered all of one, with no fresh food available, unless it was flown in. By the time things such as cake mix appeared on the shelf, they were full of insects. Freshly butchered meat was the main meal for everyone.

My first paying job was working for my dad. He hired my brother and me to count out steps at the borders of the crops and wave a flag so he could fly over and spray pesticide. Long before it was fashionable, my brother and I were being sprayed with something similar to DDT. My father didn’t deliberately spray us, but we were subject to blow over, when he passed over a strip of field, dropped the load, and then swooped over us.

My steps never matched my brother’s, and we were always off a bit. I know it bugged my dad. I still like the smell of fields being sprayed, though, just as I love the smell of jet exhaust.

(What I thought was DDT was actually parathion, a potent insecticide that was probably safer than DDT, but still not something you want to spray on children in whom you are sinking a lot of money.)

I don’t remember seeing any kangaroos except in the petting zoo in Sydney of all places, but my dad did bring me a dingo puppy after a drive he and my brother had taken outside town. The pup had already been weaned, but it’s mother was dead or gone.

Australia and me on Chezgigi.com

Having been weaned already, the puppy was a lost cause for nurturing and domestication, but I didn’t know that. All I saw was a puppy. He was that beautiful caramel color common to wild dogs and he was small. Wild dogs don’t get very large.

I kept him by my side for a couple of weeks. I was the only one he would go near. I smelled so bad after two weeks of his company, that may have been the reason I was left alone by adult human males. There can’t be a better equivalent to a chastity belt than smelling like a wild dog. All the bathing in the world won’t get the smell off of a wild creature.

My dingo baby finally ran away, never to be seen again. I would not have been allowed to take him with me, no doubt, so it worked out best for him and me.

Get this blog on your Kindle!

Please follow and like us:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)