Open Writing

When my husband and I first moved to Melbourne from New Zealand we used to escape the city on the weekends, pack a picnic and a flask of coffee and head to the hills.

The Dandenong Ranges, to be precise, with their towering green gums and ancient Mountain Ash reaching gnarled roots to the edges of the roads and the cool, shady rest areas where Crimson Rosellas and Cockatoos eat from your hands and attempt to nest in your hair.

Quaint little villages, almost ghost-towns during the week, overflow with visitors to the markets and stores. Sweet shop shelves creak under the weight of confectionary from around the globe, while tiny art galleries display the colourful work of local artists. Locals and visitors alike enjoy the flavours of the many cosmopolitan cafes serving up panninis, pancakes, prawns and anything in between.

Puffing Billy, Australia’s oldest working steam train keeps the tracks shiny with its tourist jaunts through the countryside while, warm and cosy inside, patrons enjoy fine food and wine and marvel at the countryside vista and villages.

Throughout the Dandenong Ranges modern store interiors are a stark contrast to the nineteenth century building facades hinting at former grandeur through peeling layers of paint and now illegible signs, harbouring silent tales of a long-ago former life.

Monday to Friday, locals are content to make the one-hour commute to work, knowing the sacrifice is well worth it.

I used to dream about living in the Dandenongs. At the end of the day, driving back to suburbia, I could well imagine myself pottering in a garden of towering trees and entertaining guests on a large deck with views through the forest to the suburbs below.

Three years later, my dream came true. Even though we have not spent much time here due to our working in Saudi Arabia much of the year, we are the very happy owners of a third of an acre with a timber home and our own little forest. As a bonus, we have the large deck with a spa pool and, at night, city lights sparkle through the forest below.

However, like all things, the reality is a little different to the dream. In reality I don’t have the time to swan around in the spa pool all day and in winter there is firewood to be chopped to ensure a warm and cosy night. While the majority of the garden is easy care, there is still pruning, trimming and weeding to do, while general maintenance on a timber home is high.

We had a storm recently with winds over 100km howling through the trees, bending branches and rattling the roof. We decided it would be safer to sleep downstairs in case a tired old tree should fall on the house.

Just as well too, as around midnight a roar of wind was followed by a resounding crash. On peering out between the venetians, I could barely make out a monstrosity of a tree limb where our garden shed used to be.

On closer inspection the next morning, it appeared we got off lightly, apart from the crushed shed. Our neighbours, however, did not. The limb of the gum stretched clear across their lawn, flattening an established rhododendron along with a treasured birdbath which was completely hidden beneath the timber and leaves.

A quick call to the insurance company got our little problem sorted out even though, by complete coincidence, our renewal was due the same day.

The following night I was in for a bigger shock. On a nocturnal trip to the ‘little room’, barefoot I might add, I decided to turn on the light to see if the seat was up or down (one of many annoying thing about husbands) and spotted a bug of some description on the floor.

Being tolerant of very few things with more legs than me, I bent down for a closer look. The pincers were raised – along with the forked tail. My eyes widened and I stepped back. It was still not moving so I dared a second closer look. It resembled an earwig but was not like one I had ever seen. If I didn’t know better, it could have been a scorpion. But we didn’t have them in Melbourne….did we?

I rushed to the kitchen, grabbed the nearest thing to place over it before it scuttled into the magazine pile, and went back to bed.

“There’s a bug in the toilet” I told my husband the next morning as he headed in that direction. Looking into the bowl and almost standing on the baby’s bottle cover containing the tiny suspect he asked, “Where is it?”

Once pointed out, with his desert origins and experience, I was given a positive ID on my midnight friend. “It’s a scorpion.”

I was straight onto the internet to check out the likelihood of finding a scorpion in Melbourne, fearing it may have hitched a free ride from the Middle East with my husband.

As it turned out, this type, a Marble-backed Scorpion, is reasonably common in the region and lives a happy life amongst all the leaves and bark in the forest. It only grows to a couple of centimetres but still packs a good sting in its tail.

While I still love it up here in the hills and wouldn’t trade ‘Highfield’ for anywhere, I have discovered that idle dreams are indeed a lot more romantic than the everyday realities of a lifestyle, after ditching the rose-coloured glasses.