LATROBE TO PENGUIN
Left Latrobe when Anna pointed out that local paper, The ADVOCATE, reported on my arrival in not too flattering terms (and i am referring to the LARGE, not the small headline).
click on photos to enlarge
PENGUIN (really, that's the name of the town -- you'll soon see why)
The short ride here along the coast road is glorious and easy: the road kissed the sea about 20 minutes from Latrobe and meandered along the blue turquoise thru a soft country of golden hills laced with Eucalyptus and pine.
Turner's Beach, Leith, Ulverstone... where i was surprised to find two Waratahs pecking away in the park, as comfortable as pigeons, among the seagulls.
Entering Penguin:
Despite all my inquiries and wandering along the beach at early dusk, most people had no idea where i might see the Little Penguins come waddling up the beach. I first asked a man preparing for a run, and he confidently told me to go to the beach beyond the Boy Scouts' building, down at the west edge of town. Early evening i packed my binoculars and walked down; not a Penguin in sight. I walked toward some fishermen at the end of the wharf, but they were Chinese and obviously there for culinary, not vacation, fishing. while friendly, after five smiling minutes of "Penguins?" and responses from the younger that seemed either to be Aussie-accented Chinese or Chinese-accented Aussie -- neither of which i could understand -- i gave up, smilingly thanked them, and turned away. At that point the older one asked me in clear Aussie English, "You're looking for penguins?" But he had no idea either.
I then approached another fisherman, a solid chunk of suntanned Aussie securing his boat to his trailer, but when he couldn't understand me, i started wondering if there were something wrong with my Ameri-glish. After a few more moments of confusion, i realized he was completely soused and left to ask yet another man, who I had seen just come in on his boat. He was so dully drunk that I could almost observe the long moments required for the concept of "penguins" to reach his cerebral cortex, or wherever he processed such complicated and surprising questions. When he was able to grasp the word and my desire for penguins, he responded with arm-waving directions and mumbled suggestions indicating some penguinish possibilities just to the east, near Ulverstone, or perhaps somewhere beyond, near New Zealand. My penguin pursuits were obviously over.
In compensation, i had seen more Penguin signs, memorabilia, souvenirs and earnest and honestly-named businesses incorporating the town's name than i ever imagined a town could allow:
Non surprisingly, Penguin's namesake is commemorated by a 10 foot tall cast concrete penguin, a draw for the obligatory tourist pic, facing the main street directly across from The Groovy Penguin Cafe. This place was recently bought by an Aussie woman who lived in Colorado for a while, so i wanted to meet her, but both she and her partner are out of town. I'll get 'em on the way back; this highway literally ends at the west coast in Arthur River.
BEING PENGUINISH
This beach-side town on the North coast exists in some odd period between the 30's and the 70's; my hotel, the Neptune, once an Art Deco beauty, has been updated with decks out front facing the main street and the sea beyond, a hideous "gaming" parlor, and a "bistro" that is now giving off a nauseating stench of old deep fry grease. The gentlemens' bar has been brought into the modern age with the addition of various numbers forms and racing tv screens. The few younger men stand at the bar staring up at them while older men in the back ignore them.
My room is a bizarre amalgam of 30's design and colors described in Rough Guide's Tasmania as "eyeblindingly bright"": a washstand and an old armoire are illuminated by three large windows giving onto a wrap-around veranda; once that outside light goes, all i'll have to see by is what promises to be a very dim compact flourescent bulb in the 10 foot high ceiling and another, oddly enough, sticking diagonally out of the wall next to the armoir. .
"Ladies" and "Men's" showers are down the hall from my room, and the door to each still has the beautiful 30's porthole window with the original striped glass in it; the hall carpeting was frightening when new in the 70's-- a pattern of what looks like randomly placed dog turds -- and is even more so now after so many years. On the other hand, since i seem to have entered a time warp, this carpet may be the newest pattern going. The carpet in my room has room-width stripes of alternating dull tones of scarlet, black, off white, orange, grey, with an occasional exciting stripe of lime green.
i've encountered more drunks here today than in the entire ten days i was in Latrobe with tim and anna, and more than i normally encounter in Boulder in a year. from the fishermen to a member of a Ducati group I met in the hall whose speech was so muttering that I imagined he might be a foreigner and shy about his English. i finally asked where he was originally from, thinking he might be Italian since he was short and dark but after he was able to utter "Wooloomooloo" (a suburb of Sydney) i finally realized he was at that stage where he was trying to speak, but while his brain was still able to comprehend and want to respond, all labial coordination was long gone. As i sat and wrote this evening, i could regularly hear drunken outbursts from the bar downstairs and the street below, reverberating off the buildings across the street. Drunken rednecks apparently are the same in Tasmania or Texas, but here I know they don't have guns.
The best restaurant in town, Wild -- famous for Aussie cuisine (and the menu would definitely be on my wall when i return home), is closed tonight, so i settle for fish and (undercooked, soggy) chips; while waiting for my order, three local teens came in and looked exactly like every dull-faced teen in any working class suburb in America: the guy had his stiff-brim baseball hat on sideways and some baggy hip-hop pants. one of the girls was lovely, and the other 14 yr old girl had pot belly that made her look pregnant. The tragedy is that one or both of the girls will probably be pregnant before they graduate from high school.
Tasmania is considered by "mainlanders" to be excruciatingly backwards and inbred; the joke here is that when you tell people you're a Taswegian, they ask, "where's the scar?" -- meaning, the one left when your second head was surgically removed.
Besides no penguins, lots of drunks and a gorgeous coastline, i've entered an area where even sober people speak in an even more local version of " 'strain". The normal greeting wherever i go -- from pub to grocery to bank -- is a lopsided grin and a friendly how'ya goin? which I love as much as the Texan h'wyew?. this morning, sitting here writing, a guy came in for some coffee and grinningly told me havinthisandascarper, which means "having this coffee and leaving." The one person i understood with no momentary confusion was the surprisingly jolly Swiss lady who works at the Tourist Info Centre. I've discovered that the secret to getting what people are saying is to relax the ear/brain processing apparatus and allow the flavor and tone of the words to soak in; their intent, if not always the specific meaning, then becomes clear.
The best linguistic confusion occurred in front of the Great Penguin when I said something to a young tourist couple standing near me admiring the statue; the guy asked, "are you from here?" in a way indicating to me preparation for further tourist questions. Since his fluent English was obviously not Aussie, i thought he might be a foreigner comfortable in English. He was: turned out he was from London. And he thought I was Austrailan????? Ah, the many variants and confusions of the Queen's English...
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time - Edith Wharton
