We were walking on the northern edge of Carlton Gardens, headed for the tram stop at Royal Parade. To our left, a short brick wall bounded a gentle slope of grass with the occasional elm, and through the distant shine of a streetlight I saw a small creature in shadow. Not very big, a round back, a long tail -- a housecat from the row of two-storey terrace houses on the other side of the street.
Aw, kitty. I whistled, psst'ed, held out my hand, and what had to be the clumsiest cat in the world started running towards me with the bumbling, frittered gait of a midget bodybuilder overdosing on stereoids. Its grotesque little Popeye legs swung back and forth covered the ground between us with surprising speed as I stared blankly, trying to figure out how the hell a cat could be so pokey and graceless and still be allowed to be a cat. A conical face with glistening, black eyes poked its way into the light, sniffing for food, followed by its squat little grey body. The worst cat in the world was a possum.
"Yeah, of course it's a possum," my companion said. "I didn't know how the hell you thought it was a cat." Hey, New York doesn't have possums. It has cats.
When the Europeans first landed in Australia, they had to make sense of their odd new world by relating it to the only one they'd known: sweating through a White Christmas in the summer heat, or painting landscapes of the red soil and spindly gum trees as a lush green English pastoral. To live in a new culture means continually remapping the strange into the familiar. Sometimes you even get to the point where the familiar starts to seem strange.