Fly past

One thing they don’t mention in the tourism brochures of Western Australia is the  population problem.

The country is overpopulated.

Not with humans, but with flies!

As soon as day breaks, they are all over the place, in their thousands...millions...billions! In your eyes, mouth, face, ears...going bzzz bzzzz bzzzz.

They are not nasty ones like our desi flies, which seem to have a personal vendetta against humans – these ones seem to be extremely friendly – moronically friendly – and all of them have come over to hug you and pat you on the back and shake you by the hand and  say ‘G’day mate....g’day mate...g’day mate...’ all day long and not realise that you are not as thrilled to be meeting them as they are to be meeting you.

In India you get flies when there is garbage around, or shit, or something rotten or something equally unpleasant. Not so in WA – they are everywhere – like oxygen. Stop your car anywhere and step out in complete wilderness – virgin landscape...extremely beautiful...there won’t be a soul around for 100’s of kilometres – and whooom! You are surrounded by a cloud of flies who’s dearest wish is to get as close to you as they can.

You wave and jump and dance and curse and then surrender and jump back into your car – only to find that a dozen or more flies have decided that they love you dearly and want to hitch a ride with you. Then again you curse and wave and the car wiggles dangerously in the road, causing your wife and any other driver who may happen to be in the vicinity to have a minor heart attack. Cursing and bad language happens, and then you roll down your window and shoo as many flies as you can out of the car.

I developed a theory about why there are so many flies here.

After God made the 4 continents, he got very bored with doing the same old same old.

‘Bugger this.’ He said ‘I am sick of making deer and cattle and monkeys and shit like that. I am an artist! I cannot allow myself to be bound by any one style. Now, I will make something totally weird.’

And so he thought and thought and made up all kinds of weird stuff for the fifth continent– kangaroos and duck billed platypus and koalas and stuff like that...

He made every bloody thing here so poisonous that absolutely anything can kill you with a horrible death – snakes, spiders, molluscs, shell fish, jelly fish– anything.  He made giant crazy landscapes – deserts, mountains, gorges, long winding rivers, mangrove swamps, the tallest trees in the world etc etc.  He totally freaked out.

But the problem was that so much ideating took so long, that he ran out of time. The seventh day was coming and he had to rest – but he still had a huge amount of life force to finish off.

‘Fuck this shit.’ He said ‘I’m bored.’  and fooooosssssshhhh – turned all the life force he had left into flies and went off for a rest.

That’s why the bloody place has no animals but only flies.

She-who-must-be-obeyed heard my story with a cold glare and said ‘what nonsense.’

‘Why? Is it any worse than the aboriginal story of a giant snake and a kangaroo jumping around in dreamtime when the world was soft and malleable and thus making the hills and valleys? Or for that matter, the story of a dude in a big white beard creating all of creation in 6 days and then taking a nap on the seventh day?’

‘I see a bright future for you as a mythologist re...’ she said ‘...very promising indeed.’

‘They can send me an invitation for mythologist of the year – address it to Mr Ketan Joshi and Fly.’