🇦🇺ALIEN AUSTRALIA : DREAMING IN SPACE🇦🇺

To my AUSTRALIAN FRIENDS 🦊🗝

The first time Captain Eliza Hawke saw the continent, she didn’t muck around with poetry.

“Strewth,” she muttered, pressing her forehead to the porthole. “That’s Australia. But someone’s flipped the bloody map and parked it next to a purple Jupiter knock-off.”

The shuttle dropped through three suns and a sky the colour of a stubby left in the sun too long. When the ramp clanged down outside what used to be Sydney, the heat hit like opening a barbie that’d been going since lunchtime.

Same red dirt. Same bloody blowies trying to crawl up your nose. But the Harbour Bridge was now a massive, lazy rainbow serpent made of living opal, dozing across the water with its head on Bondi and its tail flicking at Manly. Ferries still ran—skippered by dolphins wearing hi-vis vests and Akubras.

Eliza stepped out in her thongs and immediately regretted it. The sand was hot enough to fry an egg, and some enterprising goanna had already done exactly that for breakfast.

“G’day, skip,” the goanna said, wiping its snout. “You’re late. Continent’s been waiting sixty-five thousand years and then some.”

Eliza blinked. “You talk?”

“Mate, everything talks here. Even the stubby coolers give you life advice. Mostly ‘pace yourself’.”

Dr. Singh came running up, boots melting. “Captain! The DNA’s fair dinkum Strayan! Same as home! Except the kangaroos are built like brick dunny houses and the joeys glow VB gold.”

That night they camped under a sky so clear you could see the Milky Way doing burnouts. Someone cracked a tinnie; the ring-pull sang “Khe Sanh” in perfect pitch. A mob of emus wandered past dragging a carton of XXXX they’d nicked from who-knows-where.

Eliza couldn’t sleep. She wandered down to the inland sea that now surrounded Uluru. The rock was floating, yeah, but it was also rotating slowly while playing “Down Under” on didgeridoo made of pure starlight.

She kicked off her thongs and waded in. The water was warm as a Darwin shower and tasted faintly of flat white.

“Oi. Whitefella,” rumbled a voice that sounded like thunder gargling gravel. “Took your sweet time.”

Uluru lowered itself until its shadow cooled the sand. Eliza looked up and realised the whole rock was covered in ancient hand stencils. But now the hands were waving.

“You mob left us stuck on that other planet,” the rock said. “Too cold, too many poms, and don’t get me started on the coffee. So we seceded. Whole continent up and buggered off when no one was looking. Even took the good meat pies.”

Eliza cracked a grin. “And New Zealand?”

“Left ‘em behind. They kept claiming Pavlova. Fair’s fair.”

Years rolled by like a fully sick burnout in a Holden doing doughies around a supernova.