Easter in Maleny

For me, the Easter long-weekend is all about visiting my parents at their home in Maleny. For four days I wander around town and take lazy walks, read and snooze in comfy armchairs and of course, eat and drink gloriously. So this year, Easter was the perfect opportunity to introduce my British guest to a part of Australia I dearly love.

We headed up early on Friday morning, just skipping the traffic jams. First up, after the necessary morning tea/coffee and cake, was the tour of the garden. My parents have the standard large Maleny garden and every time I visit I need to be updated on all the changes; trees have come down, shrubs gone up, new veggies have been planted and new animals have taken up residence. The big new addition this time was a native bee hive, installed to help the overall health of the garden and encourage the re-generation of native bee populations in the area.The bees are very small and sting-less so you can get up close and watch as they come and go.

The hive on a stake in the veggie patch.

Native bees flying in and out, feeding the hive.

On top of these native additions, my mother is slowly building up a private art collection in the garden. There are old school-pottery projects, wood-carved seats and Portuguese roosters hidden around corners. The newest installations were her birthday and christmas gifts; a rat with attitude and a Kiwi.

The mushroom garden.

Lemons, lemons, lemons. Now where is the gin?

Friday afternoon we took a trip to Gardner's Falls. Once it was the waterhole only locals knew about, now it is on the list of spots to visit for day trippers. On this bright sunny afternoon it was packed out with visitors. No photos, because I feel weird taking snaps of strangers in their togs. Also, I could not have taken a single photo without including a bad tattoo. I have a very low opinion of the standard of tattoos in Australia. Too many, too poorly thought out, too brightly coloured and too tacky. Sitting in the stream of the falls, watching the parade of teenagers and parents pass by, it was a pretty horrifying show. Better as few people as possible see the giant purple owl stretched across some pasty guy's sunken chest or Marilyn's face wreathed in skulls.

Taken on an afternoon walk past farmland and the Maleny Dairy.

When we woke on Saturday it had rained all night and didn't look like stopping. Nevertheless, in the drizzle and mist we set off to do the Mary Cairncross rainforest walk in the hope of spotting some Pademelons before the tourist hoards arrived. We were not disappointed and saw eight of these charming little marsupials, some of them right up close. Read about our other wildlife encounters here.

Red-legged Pademelons.

Walking through the rainforest at first light, with the chilly mist and drizzle of rain and no one else near was a little magical and made dragging ourselves out of bed worth it.

We were lucky to come home to a full continental breakfast with steaming mugs of tea and coffee, which helped the morning chill. This almost the least impressive meal of the weekend, but the only one I could sneak a photograph of. The next morning was brioche french toast with freshly stewed plum and vanilla yoghurt, but I was too busy scoffing that to pause for photography.

An introduction to Australian wildlife

One of the best things about getting even a little bit 'rural' in Australia are the opportunities to see native wildlife. Lush Maleny is a wonderful place to see an array of native species and to introduce a visitor to our squawking, slithering and hopping native fauna. Starting with those that inhabit back gardens.

My parents are great bird lovers and have taken care to put up bird boxes and native flowering plants to attract birds to their garden. They have a regular parade of King Parrots, doves, Sulphur-crested and Black Cockatoos, various lorikeet species and many others flying around the trees and shrubs.

The weekend started out charmingly enough with a Tawny Frogmouth. This one had taken up daytime residence on a post right outside my parents front door. He'd been there for three days when we arrived for the weekend and did not move except for when he/she went hunting at night.

Newly resident Tawny, doing its tree-branch impression.

Equally charming are the Butcherbirds my mum feeds from the balcony every morning. My mum has always had a soft spot for Butchies. They kill garden pests, have beautiful songs and are real little characters when you get to know them. She feeds them small quantities of raw mince. Just enough to keep them coming, not enough to substitute their normal diet. Now a regular team of four to five birds come most mornings. One in particular only has one eye, so he gets some special treatment. As long as you don't scare them, they will pick the mince off your fingers.

Feeding one-eye.

As well as the bird boxes and sugar-glider boxes (there is a difference), my parents have recently had a native bee box installed. There seems to be a bit of a fad at the moment for native bee boxes. Several restaurants in Brisbane have installed them on their rooves and there is such a demand for them that the Bee Man can't keep up. Native bees are not kept for honey, they produce at an extremely slow rate, but for the health benefits to the gardens they inhabit and busily pollinate.

The hive, staked into the veggie patch, is on the outside just a polystyrene box. Watch it for a few minutes though and you see the tiny sting-less bees shuffling in and out with packets of pollen.

The tiny native bees flying in and out.

One of the main tourist attractions in Maleny is the Mary Cairncross Rainforest Walk. This walk, in a lush section of forest near Maleny town, is an easy 45 minute walk, accessible by wheel chair and has a cafe and ranger park for the hundreds of people who walk through it every weekend.

If you're a local, however, you know that the best time of day to go is at first light, before the birds and Pademelons are disturbed by the racket of people and hide away from sight. On Saturday morning, in the drizzling rain and mist, we got up at 7am and were in the park when it opened. We were the first and only people who were crazy enough to get up on a cold wet morning but it was worth it when we saw this guy just 2 metres away, lazily eating on the path in front of us.

 

Red Legged Pademelons. Comfortable around people but not the noise they make. 

He was the first of 8 Pademelons we had the good fortune to see that morning, along with a host of small fluttering native birds.

A Pademelon spying on us through the undergrowth.

A Bush Turkey, one of the least impressive native animals, but also one of the few willing to stay still for a photo.

However, perhaps the highlight of the trip, in terms of Australian animal experiences was on another walk through the dry rainforest near Baroon Pocket Dam. While pausing on a rock in a stream to take a photo, my visitor came toe to toe with a snake. Dark grey back, bright yellow belly. I thought at first it was a Yellow-bellied Black Snake and we both had minor heart palpitations at how close the experience was, but on returning home and consulting the guidebook, we decided it was probably a common tree snake.

The snake. Not a great photo but it wasn't up for posing.

I won't tell you the whole story, I don't want to spoil it for my guest for whom this is one hell of a story to tell everyone back home in England. The time he came This Close to a Potentially Poisonous Snake. Can't take that away from him.

Thus concludes an introduction to Australian wildlife. Some of it might kill you, most of it won't.

Next stop: the crocs at Australia Zoo!

Half-arsed book review: Curtain by Agatha Christie

I spent the weekend last visiting my parents up at Maleny. I love weekends up there. I do little but eat, drink wine from my Dad's cellar and read for three days. It is very peaceful and slightly fattening.

The other thing I am great at doing with my time in Maleny is buying books. Maleny has more than its fair share of excellent book shops. Rosetta Books is one of my favourite book stores and places to spend money. One of those fabulous book sellers that has one of everything, organises author talks and supports the entire Maleny writing community. There are also a couple of great second hand booksellers with resident dogs who let you scratch them behind the ears.

This trip I limited myself to two titles. From Rosettas I bought The Best of Women's Travel Writing vol. 8 (can't wait to dive into that one!) and from Maleny Bookshop I bought my first ever Agatha Christie. I am a huge fan of the BBC adaptations of Christie's novels; Marple or Poirot with David Suchet. I re-watch them, even after I know exactly who did it in the library with which poisoned tea cup. But I have never read any of her original works. So I bought myself a hard copy of Poirot's last mystery Curtain, which upon completion was hidden in a safe and not published after the Christie' death.

As much as I enjoy watching mysteries on TV I never read them, because I can't stand not knowing who did it. I skip to the end of the book because I can't stand the tension. So I confess – I already knew who did part of the mystery of Curtain before I bought my copy. Then when I inadvertently read the first page, I found I couldn't stop. I read for 4 solid hours without a break. I was completely taken in. I now understand the universal appeal and popularity of Marple's novels. The mystery is seductive and brilliant, the language is simple, the writing concise. It is the sort of book almost anyone could pick up and enjoy on a lazy Sunday afternoon just as I had.

In Curtain, the incomparable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot – the star of so many Christie mysteries and a character she came to hate – returns to the scene of his first ever case The Mysterious Affair at Styles. He is again accompanied by his close friend Arthur Hastings as he hastens to solve one final puzzle - perhaps his most devilish case yet. 

 Hercule Poirot, portrayed by David Suchet. The only literary character to ever be given a full-page obituary in the New York Times

I'm not a mystery novel aficionado, though may be this is a turning point for me. I also find I cannot write a review on such a classic. I'm reading Anna Karenina at the moment and have no intention of writing a serious review of that tremendous work of classic fiction either.

The most intelligent comment I can make about Curtain, or probably just about any Christie mystery  is if you see a copy, indulge yourself. You will enjoy it a lot more than you think you will.