Who do we think we are?

A slightly more reflective piece as I transition from a week in Canberra to three days in Melbourne. I'm very conscious that I'm a fleeting visitor here, but there are impressions that I want to set down and remember.

What a different world Australia is! It's hard to imagine how alien its landscape, flora and fauna were to the first Europeans to land here. A walk through the National Gallery in Canberra shows that it took artists a couple of generation to transition from the European palette of bright greens to the bluer greens and the harsher light of Australia. In Queanbeyan I was woken up each morning by the sound of Australian magpies - they look similar to Europeans ones but are from a different family and have an entirely different (and much more pleasant ) call. Something like the sound of the lower register of the flute stop on a slightly out of tune pipe organ, or perhaps even Andean panpipes. Here the parrots screech and kookaburras have (to use the Monty Python phrase) a sarcastic laugh.

Melbourne seems more European, in some ways, though that is rather superficial. There are more imported and fewer native trees. There are also many older buildings, all some kind of compromise between the European heritage and the Australian climate. Most attractive is what I call 'dainty domestic'. In this part of Melbourne, near the university, are streets of Victorian terraces with decorative ironwork and built-in sunshades. Another common style might be called 'colonial commercial' - no-nonsense shops and offices with a four-square appearance and little ornamentation. In the university area itself there's a tendency towards what I can only describe as  the 'grimly gothic', a rather ponderous set of buildings, rooted in the earth rather than soaring towards heaven. All the gloom and none of the fun of the best gothic revival. This evening I went to evensong in the Anglican Cathedral, a rather incongruous building opposite a large, old railway station and the ultra-modern art gallery. Designed by Butterfield (Keble College, Oxford) it has his characteristic banding pattern on the masonry and (less fortunately) his characteristic muffled acoustic.

But this is a vibrant and culturally mixed country. Leigh and Corina illustrate this themselves and as well as reminding me of the power of friendship also set me thinking on the importance of family. Corina brings an Asian commitment to the extended family. She, Leigh and her siblings fought for her parents to settle in Australia and between them raised funds for their new home (next deoor!). When their daughter, Evelyn, was married a few years ago they took 23 members of the family - including the newly-married couple - to stay in their 2-bedroom holiday home for a week so that they could bond together into a new family unit. The same process was repeated when their son married. While I can't imagine that happening in my own family (anyone want to contradict me?) I was definitely impressed by what to Corina was simply a natural way of family life.