Craig shows me the annexe in which I’m going to stay, then he offers to show me around their property. They live a little away from the village, near a river which flows peacefully from the wooded hills that can be seen nearby, in a single-storey house whose wide, gently sloping roof must offer a welcome shade in summer. Their vast, perfectly maintained grounds are bordered on each side by palm trees and exotic plants with colorful flowers. The part below serves as a vegetable garden, while a fence on the right delimits the barnyard. My host seems particularly proud of his breeding of chickens and geese, which gossip happily as they see him approach. I ask him how many he has as he throws some seeds at them.

“I have four geese and ten chickens,” he replies. “But one of my hens was eaten by a snake last week.
-By a snake? I say, startled and wide-eyed.
-Yes, a python. They’re quite common over here.”

As proof, he hands me his phone on which I can see the picture of a reptile with gray and olive green scales which seems huge to me, and whose body is curiously inflated to half its length by the shape of the poor hen being digested. The vegetable garden in the background is clearly recognisable: no doubt, this impressive photo was taken in the very place where we stand. I wonder how I would react if I had to face such a creature…

“It’s at least three meters long!
-Oh, a little more I think, more like three meters and a half. But pythons aren’t dangerous, they don’t have venom, and they help regulating the number of mice. It’s easy to get rid of them: I just grab them by the back of their head and their tail, stuff them in a big bag and throw them further into the bush, he calmly explains to me while imitating the gestures. It takes them a while to get back here! You just have to make sure they can’t wrap themselves around you. It happened to me once, I had a bad grip and he got twisted around my arm. I started to lose feeling in my hand and had a hard time getting rid of it.”

I doubt I’d be able to show such composure if this situation were to happen to me, but fortunately no snake of any kind comes to disturb the peace of this moment. It’s almost as if time had stopped. There is no wind at all, and the atmosphere is filled with the pleasant smell of the freshly turned soil in the vegetable garden where Craig worked before my arrival. His knowledge about Australia seems limitless, whether he talks about history, geography, or the countless strange creatures that inhabit the country. I’m hanging on every of his words, not seeing the time pass, until the golden light of the end of the day gradually gives way to the darkness of twilight. It’s not until Viv calls to let us know that dinner will be ready soon that I realise it’s almost night time already. I don’t feel like going out to get food, and I’m delighted with their offer to join them.

They are the first Australians I properly meet and I am dying to ask them dozens of questions, not really knowing where to start. Given my fairly average level of English, Viv first decided to teach me some local expressions. She explains to me that it is quite customary here to shorten the words: brekkie instead of breakfast, arvo instead of afternoon, mozzies instead of mosquitoes, or even g’day as a friendly greeting.

“It even works for proper nouns: there are no McDonald’s in Australia, only Macca’s! Which doesn’t make their food any better though… And then if you want to become a true Australian, there’s a sentence you absolutely need to remember: ”no worries mate!”, no problems my friend, it’s alright! No matter what, you always have to know how to stay positive.”

Later during the evening, I also discover that my hosts are both very involved in the social life of their small town, volunteering in several local associations and fervent environmental activists. Craig is actually quite critical of the government’s environmental policy, revealing me a not exactly admirable aspect of the country that I was still unaware of.

“A couple of friends and one of our two sons and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll probably talk a lot about politics, but if you’re interested we’d be happy to have you back at our table” Viv kindly suggests to me in conclusion, much to my delight.

The effects of jetlag that had disturbed my sleep during my first nights in Byron Bay have almost completely vanished, and I wake up refreshed the next morning. After four days in Australia, I’m slowly getting used to some of the most unusual aspects of daily life that I found odd when I first arrived: left-hand drive, unusual road signs, those strange banknotes which I can now distinguish by their color… Other details still surprise me just as much, such as the almost exaggerated politeness of the people in the shops or the large proportion of 4x4s and pick-ups among the vehicles in circulation. And then there is this omnipresent tropical vegetation, these eucalyptus trees and their camphor scent carried by the breeze, these birdsongs that I hear for the first time, these low dwellings all similar with their wide terraces and their roofs in corrugated iron, these schoolchildren in uniform, an incongruous legacy of British colonization… All these differences with my habits delight me, each new thing out of the ordinary enchants me. Only slight disappointment: I still haven’t seen a single kangaroo.

I spend the day exploring the surroundings of Murwillumbah. I especially climb to the summit of Mount Warning, this mountain which stood out on the horizon when I was in Byron Bay, much more poetically named Wollumbin in the local Aboriginal language which means “cloud catcher”. The view that awaits me at the top is splendid: to the west, long chains of wooded hills stretch as far as the eye can see, remnants of intense volcanic activity that took place millions of years ago, interspersed with bright green valleys where livestock and agriculture have replaced the forest. On the east side, the hills softens towards the nearby Pacific Ocean, an immense blue mass extending to infinity. The sky is perfectly clear, and I can catch sight of both the peninsula of Cape Byron and the white point of its lighthouse to the south, as well as the silhouettes of the skyscrapers of the Gold Coast further north.