Out in the Wilds of Dunsborough, WA

A rustling in the attic sets my nerves on edge, then a heavy thud against an exterior wall – maybe the roof?  I am on high alert.  I turn the light in the bedroom off, and peer out of this borrowed and unfamiliar house into the immense darkness, able to eek out the profile of a patio chair, a balcony beam, some eucalypts, but nothing live.

I pull the curtains closed again and turn on the bedside lamp.  I try to pay attention to my book, We of the Never Never, but it is a challenge.  There is a padding, a scurrying, a bit of scratching above me.

It is all one can do to not remind oneself of the myriad strange and sometimes deadly animals in Australia.

Bill Bryson spent pages and pages and pages – virtually his whole book – fascinated by them, then I read in the Songlines, in the restrained Chatwin tone: “The perenty has a nasty set of teeth, but is harmless to man unless cornered: in fact, apart from scorpions, snakes and spiders, Australia is exceptionally benign.”  Well, how’s that for helpful.

This animal above me is too small to be a person, I reason, and too large to be one of those on Chatwin’s list.  I return to reading.

Upon arriving in Australia, I found it to be such a nice, trusting and unassuming country that I assumed Bryson was making it all up.  Really, there is very little to dramatize here, and so at first, I thought Bryson had just been looking for a hook, an “in” with the melodrama.  He made it sound like Australians have gotten so used to the deadly animals with which they live that they laugh off encounters with them as harmless, just a bit of fun.

I thought he was making something out of nothing until I witnessed the very phenomenon he wrote about: an amazingly sedate conversation between Ian and his two friends about the marked increase in shark attacks in the last year – something like 7 in WA in the last 7 months.

Ian: “When I go diving with my brother-in-law, I try to stay within the sphere of his shark shield.”

A shark shield is an electromagnetic pulse that deters sharks by zapping them in the nose, more or less.  It’s like an underwater electric fence.  The thing is, I learned and not from Ian, the shark shield first attracts the sharks before deterring them with a little electrocution.

“Shark shields are essentially also shark bait,” explained another Aussie friend who has a much healthier (or honest) fear of the things.

So trying to swim within the sphere of the shield is probably the most dangerous place to be; one mis-stroke and you are in the realm of shark food, rather than safety.

Ian’s friend then related the coverage of a shark attack on the news.  “They said they found the man’s bathers,” he explained (bathers being swimming trunks).  “I thought, what an odd thing to find if he were attacked by a shark – just the bathers.  You would think they’d be torn up.  Anyway, it turns out what the news really meant, but was too delicate to say, was that they found the entire mid-section of his torso, with the bathers still attached.”

Then there were some chuckles about the silly propriety of the news.  Apparently most recently, the news anchors, daring not to say that a famous footie star was discovered trying to smuggle cocaine up his ass, instead said, “They found drugs in his system and arrested him.”

Then they all laughed hysterically and ran off to the shark-infested ocean.

So, before I left for Dunsborough, a sleepy beachside town with as many vacation homes as permanent residents, I quizzed Ian on the possible wildlife I might encounter down here on the Cape Naturaliste peninsula.

“Oh, mostly an opposum or two.  Maybe some ants.”

Now beginning to understand this Australian penchant for the brightside, I pushed a bit further.  “Snakes?”

“Well,” he relented, “I mean if you go running through the bush.  But the paths are well paved.  If you go in the bush, just wear some shoes and you’ll be fine.  Snakes are as scared of you as you are of them.”

“Spiders?”  I asked.

“The dangerous ones are in Sydney.”  This is true, everything in this country seems to have evolved to super micro-habitats, except for the kangaroos and the rabbits.

“And the opposums?”

“They might climb on the roof.  They’re cute.  They’ll run away from you.”

Further inquiry proved that he seemed to think that was really it.

In bed, reading the Never Never book about a woman who accompanies her husband to a bush station in the Northern Territory in 19-oh-something, a scratching now takes up over my head.  It is like a dog sniffing for food, or varmints.

When the Aussies say “house” they sometimes mean the equivalent of an American “cabin”, which as you know can take many forms.  Take Tahoe for instance: there are those small little ones of wood and aluminum siding, quirky, and where the kids who work on the mountain usually live.  Then there are the Mansion Cabins, usually in the resorts themselves and usually property of a rich San Franciscan who comes up for the weekends in the winter.

The house I’m staying in is more like a quirky cabin. The sides of the house really are sheets of aluminum.  Inside, it’s mostly wood, with linoleum flooring on the bottom floor and carpet on the top floor.  The ceiling is simply rectangles of Styrofoam laid in.  If you reach up and push, you can lift it up.

Which makes me wonder where that opposum really is.  He might be in the attic, but is it possible he could have filched his way between the ceiling of the first floor and the floor of the top floor?

I text Ian something very jovial, because they’re loaning me this house for free (or possibly I think it’s for a case of beer and a hug, but anyway) and I don’t want to be a pain in the ass: “Can the opposums actually get in the house through the foam ceiling boards?  There was a huge thud against the downstairs glass door and a scrambling on the balcony or inside.  I’m sure it was an opposum, the little fucker.”  I put a smiley face at the end, just so he’d know I wasn’t annoyed.

He sends me a very logical text back.  “I don’t think one could actually get in the house, but maybe in the attic.  If they were actually in the house, there would be a lot of evidence… i.e. POO.”

I have to laugh at the logic.  And it does make me feel better.

I wake up a couple times during the night to his nosing about, but I just go back to sleep.  I am surprisingly calm and comfortable with this close encounter with wildlife.  I think you kind of just have to be here.  What other option do you have, really?

Check out the cutest possum in Australia.  Honey badger, meet honey possum (unfortunately those aren’t the ones in the house):