No woman is an island

For my last fling I’ve booked a cabin on Rottnest for five days.  It’s an island 45 minutes by ferry from Perth and it’s in the bone marrow of the city. No more than 15kms long, famed for bikes only – no cars here  - and for quokas. It was named for the latter by the Dutch who were the first of many Europeans not to comprehend that the place was populated before them and so to colonise it. Like mistaking Aborigines for not being people, they mistook the quokas for big rats and called the island ‘rat nest’. Quokas are small marsupials, running and hopping and carrying little joeys in pouches just like big sister kangaroo and wallaby.  Think very big brown cat with long tail that can run on two legs or four depending who is chasing it.

Anyway, everyone I’ve met in Perth has Rottnest in their blood.  Blotto on Rotto is the way that kids celebrate leaving school and the nostalgia about the place is probably about lots of firsts – first stay away from home in a state where kids don’t leave home to go to Uni, first romance/sex, first dose of nostalgia about school trips of yore….

It is beautiful – think white sandy beaches, turquoise sea and great coral reef for the snorklers.  I love it but I also think it’s weird. As I’ve cycled, swum and walked it I’ve conceived an idea that Rottnest is a one island industry comprising lots of small businesses all beavering (quokaring?) away at marketing us ‘our’ Rottnest.  It’s badged as ‘special’ and marketed by ‘I heart my Rotto’. There’s a ‘mall’ not indoor and nicely done but with Dome (coffee) and Subway franchises amongst a range of other retail opportunities - ‘wellbeing’ and clothes amongst them (temptation resisted).  Then, in a place to which nature gave everything you need to have fun,  there’s a family play park, an aqua park for little ones (inflatables in the sea), tennis courts, cinema hut, mini golf course, two or three pubs/restaurants, tourist train and round island bus, all making a buck or ten.  So, although I like it a lot, it’s not quite what I’d expected from the romanticised build up. 

The effect for me is a strange feel to Rotto: ‘the Prisoner’ and Stepford wives spring to mind but neither quite nails it or spoils it. The ‘settlement’ is uniformly yellow – a deeper tone than the surrounding sand but not as deep as my tan (hah!).  And there’s something spooky about the way it’s organised. Walking back into the settlement after last bus time I’m passed by and stared at from convoys of electric vehicles heading off on missions to make the place perfect for tomorrow. Seeing a man using a garden blower to get the sand off the concrete floor of a beach shelter was especially strange. I found myself thinking, as a small plane buzzed me out while I was out walking later than the norm, that RIA (Rottnest Island Authority) is only one letter different from the CIA. It was then that I knew that I’d been here on my own for too long. School friends Jan and Squidge are coming over tomorrow to share the cabin for my last couple of days. Probably just as well.

Postscript – I think the RIA have been reading this and I am under attack!!!!! Passing time before meeting Jan and Squidge, I cycled to Little Paraqueet Bay  - no brightly coloured parrot-alikes but swallows diving and swooping and, in human terms I have the place all to myself. Except for the invisible jelly fish that got me when I struck out for a swim. The RIA must be a pretty powerful force to render jelly fish invisible (or maybe it was a stingray firing from a distance).  Anyway it stung. I danced up and down in the ocean for a bit making sure that it had go me from outside my costume and was not contained within.  So here I am, waiting for my friends on the ferry with a large red welt across my belly and another lower down. Let’s just say that cycling back was not much fun.  Bastards are clearly out to get me.

Snakescript - aiding a sense of paranoia are the sign boards repeated throughout the island starting with the word ‘danger’ and ending in ‘venomous snake’. I have never had so much call for the word ‘venomous as I have here.  Signs were right though – cycling round a bend with Jan and Squidge behind me there was a whopper – a yard long, 2 inches thick at the business end, black as he ace of spades  and venomous as all hell. We saw its smaller cousin from the safety as a bus the next day.  These buggers are a protected species so the bus had to avoid running it over. We were very careful walking on metalled roads and did not venture onto tracks. Strikes me that riddling the place with venomous (that word again) snakes is an excellent way of protecting whatever secrets are held on Rottnest.  Send for St Patrick I say.