It's just more than eight years since I got back from a working holiday in Australia and it occurred to me recently that this would be as good a time as any to start unpacking. The big hold-all I stuffed everything into in Melbourne has been in the corner of a bedroom ever since. I've dipped into it for the odd thing, such as the souvenir leather purse ("Genuine Kangaroo scrotum") I bought for a friend. But for the most part the bag has stood there undisturbed, as solid as Ayer's Rock and gradually turning the same colour.
So when I finally opened it again the other day, memories of Australia came flooding out, accompanied by some strangecoloured spiders. (Memo to the Department of Agriculture: I'm just kidding about the spiders. In fact, the most disturbing things I found in there were some shirts I wore circa 1988 which, because they've been lying at the bottom of a bag so long, have turned shockingly tasteless in the intervening years.)
Like many others, I was tempted Down Under by the hype surrounding the 1988 bicentennial of Rolf Harris's birth. But since childhood I had been fascinated by questions such as: why don't people in Australia fall off the Earth? And even though school science had long ago taught me the answer (gravity is four times stronger there), some of that fascination persisted.
The late 1980s was a time of great change in Australia. Two centuries on, "white" Australia was redefining itself, while the bicentennial was being questioned by the aboriginal community, who claimed they had been there for 40,000 years but just hadn't advertised.
And the prime minister, Bob Hawke, had cried on television. This was a moment of national crisis: Hawke was what Australians call a "regular bloke" but many political commentators feared he was turning into a "sheela". In the event, he survived the incident and his popularity soared.
There was an added attraction in going there at the time, in that it was somewhere you could get away from Australian soaps. Under the terms of a treaty signed secretly in 1988, Irish and British TV stations were forced to screen at least eight hours of Australian real-life drama every day by way of reparation for exporting so many convicts in the past.
Not that I disliked the Australian soap per se. It's just that for my money none of the modern ones ever reached the artistic heights of Skippy. Most of them didn't even have kangaroos, which was a serious failing, because if there's one thing that fascinates us all about Australia it's the funny animals.
Indeed, more than any other country, Australia is defined by its animals: the koalas, the emus, the wombats, the munchkins, the Tasmanian Devils and, of course, the "socceroos". Australians themselves love to play up the dangers of the local wildlife - killer spiders and snakes, and dingoes that steal babies - even though most of them (the Aussies, not the wildlife) live in suburbs where the biggest personal security risk is the rogue lawn-sprinkler.
I know: I spent three weeks in Perth trying to sell vacuum cleaners in those suburbs and the only times I experienced danger was when I entered a house with a sign such as: "We shoot every third salesman. The second one just left."
But the balance of nature is very delicate in Australia. Every few years, it seems, there is a serious imbalance of some species or other. You've probably heard how the cane toad was introduced to try to keep down the numbers of something else (TV soaps, I think), only to become an even bigger pest itself. On other occasions, it has been rabbits or mice. Most recently, sheep ravaged large parts of the country after being introduced to control the numbers of its natural prey, the crocodile.
Apart from animals, the other thing Australia is famous for is sport. I spent another few months working in a zinc smelter in Melbourne and, especially on the night shift, the talk often turned to sport. The night shift was an undemanding one: every couple of hours you had to perform routine tasks to prevent the machinery overheating and the only danger was that if you forgot any of them, you could burn the smelter down, which only happened once while I was there.
So there was plenty of time to talk about sport, with the discussions often turning into arguments. And at 4 a.m., when your brain had gone off duty and Mr Testosterone was in charge of all communications, these arguments could get really, really stupid. I remember one about horse-racing in which my opponent argued - broadly - that the Australian horse was far superior to anything in Europe, while I countered - sweepingly - that the Australian horse was best suited for use in certain kinds of stew.
LIKE many of the most heated arguments, this was strictly academic, since at that time, the two horse communities had never met. But imagine my excitement when, a few years later and back in Ireland, I learned an Irish horse had won the Melbourne Cup at the first attempt. I would have loved to send my ex-colleague some stew recipes - rarely in your life do you get the chance to be this triumphant - but cruelly, I didn't have his address.
I came back from Australia with a tendency to speak through my teeth, which took weeks to overcome. Australians claim they speak this way to keep flies out of their mouths but the truth is a lot simpler. You try walking upside down and talking at the same time and see how you sound!