​On my very first day in Australia, I spotted these odd pink and gray birds. They strolled along in a side-to-side gait that wasn’t quite a waddle, often in twos, feeding from the ground. They were far from graceful—until they took to the air. These mystery birds turned out to be strong, swift flyers.
 
The birds were galahs, a type of cockatoo, and I’ve seen them nearly every day since. Galahs are one of Australia’s most common birds. The name “galah” comes from the indigenous Yuwaalaraay language of northern New South Wales. The word has also become Australian slang for a fool or idiot, perhaps because Australians have perceived the bird as a clown or not particularly smart.  
 
The indigenous peoples of Australia had different stories about how the galah got its distinctive appearance. One version said the bald spot beneath the bird’s crest was caused by a lizard’s carelessness. Another story attributed the galah’s pink breast to blood lost in a battle, while in another, the galah becomes pink and gray after trying to help a dove ease the pain of a festering foot.
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Here are some facts about galahs:

While galahs don’t have the raucous confidence of sulphur-crested cockatoos or the cheekiness of gang-gangs, they always strike me as dignified, with a fussy charm all their own. 

While many towns may consider street art to be a public nuisance or at best a civic experiment, street art actually saved the town of Sheffield, Tasmania. Sheffield is located about fourteen miles inland of Tasmania’s northwest coast.

Sheffield was a thriving little town while several hydroelectric plants were being built in northwest Tasmania. By the mid-1980s though, the construction had finished, and the town shared in the area’s general decline. The town’s leaders looked for inspiration to the other side of the world, in Canada, in a small town on Vancouver Island called Chemainus.

Also facing an economic decline, Chemainus had begun painting murals on its buildings, which drew visitors and revenue. The citizens of Chemainus credited the murals with saving the town.

Sheffield decided to give murals a try too. In 1986, John Lendis painted the first mural, and Sheffield rebranded itself as the Town of Murals. 

​Sheffield encouraged artists, commissioning and creating murals for the town's buildings.  Many of the murals depict the area’s history and life in the town’s early days. The emphasis on having an enormous outdoor art gallery of more than 100 murals worked, and now Sheffield is a tourist destination.

The town now hosts a yearly International Mural Fest, where nine artists paint works based on one theme. The winning murals are then displayed in Mural Park for the next twelve months, ensuring that returning visitors can see new artwork.

Sheffield offers more information about each mural on a website, and the Visitor Information Center has both a map and a self-guided audio tour.

What a wonderful way to spend a morning—looking at the paintings that saved a town. 

​Everyone in North America is familiar with opossums. The only marsupial in the United States and Canada, the opossum eats many harmful insects, including more than 5,000 ticks in a season. 

​The name came from the Algonquin word “aposoum,” meaning a white dog or white beast. The informal name for this animal is “possum.”

We have very different possums here. They live in New Guinea, Australia, and Indonesia. These possums received their name because English naturalist Sir Joseph Banks thought they looked like the North American opossum.  

Both Australian possums and North American possums are marsupials, nocturnal, omnivorous, and live in trees. Both play dead (playing possum) when they’re threatened.

Now for the differences. They belong to different orders: Didelphimorphia for opossum and Diprotodontia for the possum. While the opossum has coarse hair and a hairless tail (like a rat), possums have softer hair and long bushy tails. Possums come in more diverse colors, and they have a rank smell because of musk glands behind their ears.

Other facts about possums include:

While someone from North American would understand a reference to either an opossum or possum, an Australian would probably think I was talking funny if I added an “o” to one of their possums.

The longest night of the year is coming soon for the southern hemisphere. On 21 June, the South Pole has its maximum tilt away from the sun, resulting in a winter solstice. How do Canberrans celebrate? Some may go to parties. Others, however, brave the cold for charity.

The annual Winter Solstice Nude Charity Swim raises money for the charities Love Your Sister and Lifeline. Participants plunge naked into the icy Lake Burley Griffin at daybreak. Last year, a bagpiper played before the intrepid swimmers launched. Although the event started with only four people three years ago, it is growing. Last year, sixty people participated, and this year, an estimated 31 teams and 122 people are signed up so far, with two days to go. The chilly dunk is scheduled for sunrise at 7:12 am, and the morning forecast is for partly sunny skies with the temperature a little below freezing.

The other charity event is the tenth annual CEO Sleepout sponsored by the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Australia. On 20 June, one of the longest nights of the year, leaders across Australia in business, government, and communities will sleep without shelter to raise money to battle homelessness and poverty. In Canberra this year, the CEO Sleepout will be held at the airport, in Hangar 47 on the Fairbairn RAAF base. Airport representatives say that temperatures regularly fall to below freezing and “aircraft noise will be a constant reminder of the harsh realities of sleeping rough.” The hope in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is to raise at least $700,000 AUD for services to help the homeless.

While I don’t think I’ll be shivering in Lake Burley Griffin or sleeping rough in a hangar on this winter solstice, I’ll be supporting the people who do and celebrating the arrival of the longer days to come. 

Thirty minutes away from Canberra, at the top of a hill in Sutton, New South Wales, is an astonishing sight: a stone circle reminiscent of Stonehenge.

Unlike many people, when Robbie Wallace saw a pile of boulders, his first thought was to build Stonehenge on his own property. Robbie, who has an earth-moving business, was tasked by a local sheep farmer to get rid of the large rocks sticking up in his paddocks. The columns of blue granite reminded Wallace of Stonehenge, so he called his wife Tracey and asked her to find him a map of the site. When Tracey came home, she found the stones Robbie had hauled away, one of which weighs about 17 tons, in a line at the top of the hill. When asked how she felt about creating their own circle of stones, her response was, “What a great idea!” Over the next few weeks, they planned their “Henge,” drawing from plans of Stonehenge and their own imaginations. The result is magical on a cold, foggy morning, about a week before the winter solstice.​​

The Wallaces are passionate about their stone circle, and Robbie takes photographs in every type of weather and light. Those pictures are featured on their website’s photo gallery and Twitter feed. ​

While the Henge wasn't built to be a tourist attraction, people have wanted to see it. The circle of stones draws a wide range of visitors who come for book launches, Halloween parties, photography tutorials,  ghost tours, weddings (including one where all the participants were cosplayers), and druid ceremonies. Everyone finds something different in the circle of stones, and Tracey Wallace explains, "We let them take from it what they want."

Anyone interested in visiting the Henge can contact the Wallaces via email and make an appointment.

In the National Automobile Museum of Tasmania is a green 1974 Holden Monaro HQ GTS in completely original condition. Even though I know nothing about cars, it didn’t take long for me to recognize how special this one is.

To understand why, imagine a foggy night in early January 1975 on the Tasman Bridge in Hobart. In the Derwent River below, a bulk ore carrier, called Lake Illawarra, collided with several pylons of the Tasman Bridge. A large section of the bridge deck collapsed, falling into the river and onto the ship. The ship sank, and seven of its crew died. Four cars failed to stop in time, plunging into the river, killing five occupants.
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The green Holden Monaro was balancing precariously on what was left of the bridge.

Frank Manley was the driver of that new car. His wife Sylvia was with him, along with their daughter and her uncle in the back seat. As Frank later recollected, the lights had gone out on the bridge, so they thought there had been an accident. His wife realized the bridge was gone when the road’s white line disappeared. She yelled for Frank to stop, and he hit the brakes. 

“Next thing,” Frank remembered, “we dropped over, and the wife said, ‘Put her in reverse!’ And I said, ‘Bugger reverse, get out!’” Frank explained later, “The back wheels were off the concrete, off the bridge, and if I had put her in reverse, I think the vibration would have sent us the rest of the way off the bridge.”

Frank and his family escaped the car. Since the bridge collision had happened on a Sunday night, there was very little traffic, with few cars on the bridge. The disaster had cut the main artery to Hobart’s eastern suburbs, causing major disruption.​

The repairs to the bridge took nearly three years. It reopened in October 1977. Frank Manley continued to drive his Holden Monaro.
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Every museum is filled with objects that defied the odds, that lasted long enough to make it to a museum. This car, however, feels like a particularly lucky survivor.

As the weather chills here in Canberra, my thoughts turn to hot coffee on frosty mornings. And I’m fortunate—spoiled even—because Australia has wonderful coffee and great cafés. The experience, though, is somewhat different than in the United States.

Many cafés in Canberra offer outdoor seating. 

Customers order at the counter, and a server will bring your food and drinks out to the table.

At my local café, the young man behind the counter always greets me with “Hello, lovely” and a big smile. While that greeting is unique to him, nearly every server I’ve met in Australia has been polite, friendly, and talkative.  

“How ya going?” is his next question. This universal Australian greeting threw me at first. I felt as if I should answer: “I’m going here, and then I’m going to the store.” The question means: “How are you doing?”

Then he’ll ask: “What are you after?” which also puzzled me as a newcomer. I wanted to point to the person in front of me in line and respond: “I’m after her.” What it means is: “Give me your order.”

My local café has a wide range of coffee drinks available, the same as in the States. One oddity here is that decaf costs more. Which is illogical to me, because thinking about it, decaf is actually LESS coffee. Some cafés also carry more exotic drinks like turmeric lattes and beetroot lattes.

The next coffee decision is whether I’m drinking it at the café or leaving with it. It took me the longest time to remember to ask for “takeaway,” not “to go.” The only response “to go” gets is a blank expression.

“You’ll have it in a tick,” the young man promises next, which means quickly, or in a short time.

After I say, “thank you,” the response is “that’s all right,” as if I had apologized for something. The phrase is Aussie for “you’re welcome.”

After I pay, he’ll say “Ta,” which means “thank you.”

No tipping is expected, although I am starting to spot tip jars sprouting up on counters.

When I finish, I just leave, as if from a restaurant. Café customers do not bus their cups and plates. The only place here where I have ever bused my own plates is Ikea’s in-store café.

​Overall, going to a local café in Australia is a lovely, soul-affirming experience—and I get coffee too.

Although this strange animal looks like an alien hybrid of a porcupine and an anteater, it’s neither a rodent like the porcupine nor a typical mammal like the anteater. This is a short-beaked echidna, found in Australia and New Guinea. Echidnas, also called spiny anteaters, are monotremes, a mammal that lays eggs. The only other egg-laying mammal in the world is the platypus.

The mother lays an egg, and it’s incubated in a temporary pouch. Once the egg hatches, the baby echidna—called a puggle—stays in the pouch and laps up milk from special glands called milk patches. Unlike other mammals, echidnas do not have nipples. The puggle stays in the pouch for about two months, when it begins to grow spines. The mother then moves it from her pouch to a burrow and cares for it the next seven months. Echidnas nest in burrows that other animals have left behind or they can sleep in hollow logs, rock crevices, under bushes, or in piles of leaves.

Echidnas use their narrow snout, which functions as both a nose and mouth, to search out ants, termites, spiders, worms, and other larvae. They capture their food with a long, sticky tongue. They can forage up to 18 hours a day and are most active from dusk until dawn.

Their spines are a specialized kind of hair and are used for defense. When attacked, they will curl up like a hedgehog. They can also use their powerful claws to bury themselves in the ground to get away from an attacker.

Here are five more fascinating facts about echidnas:

1. Echidnas are named after a creature in Greek mythology, who was half woman, half snake, probably because they have both mammalian and reptilian characteristics.
2. Their sticky tongues can be almost seven inches long.
3. They are the most widespread of Australia’s native mammals and can live anywhere from snowy mountains to deserts.
4. In colder areas, they will hibernate, waking every 2 to 3 weeks.
5. While their lifespan in the wild is about 15 years, echidnas can live up to 50 years in captivity.

So while I very seldom see one of these alien-looking animals, I know they’re in the neighborhood not too far away, munching on ants and other insects every night. 

The power of water does weird and wonderful things to the southern coast of Tasmania. Strong winds from the southwest create pounding waves that attack the rockface and erode the coastline. In addition to the Tesselated Pavement, three other sites on the Tasman Peninsula illustrate the remarkable power of water: The Blowhole, Tasman Arch, and Devils Kitchen.

Before looking at The Blowhole, here’s a primer on how water forms caves. Imagine the sea as it crashes against the base of cliffs. The waves carry sand and rock debris, which act like a big horizontal piece of sandpaper, cutting a notch into the vertical rockface until a crack or joint is reached. Compressed water and air wedge in the crack, forcing the rock apart. Continued erosion makes a cave longer and wider.

The Blowhole was a sea cave and tunnel until the roof at the back of the tunnel collapsed. The result was a broad arch with a blowhole behind it.

Eventually, the water will cause the rest of the arch to collapse as well so that it looks more like the next formation.

Devils Kitchen was likely a sea cave and then a tunnel. The waves over many thousands of years have eroded the rock, causing the roof to completely collapse. The water follows its inexorable path, cracking joints to create new caves in the rockface.