At last, the tinkling chatter of wrens has returned to the low bushes outside my door.
These past few days have been a noise-free balm after the boom crash theatre of big weather barged across our landscape like a drunk uncle rearranging furniture in the dark.
Now that kids are back in school and adults have returned to work, swimming pools are doof-doof and scream-free. Even the afternoons are noiseless, apart from the occasional mosquito leg-slap on the verandah.
I read somewhere that only the wealthy are able to live in a noise-free world. They work in hushed glass buildings, live in cool, silent mansions, travel in sound-proofed cars and jets, and holiday in tranquil natural spaces far from the madding rabble.
The rest of us live with the incessant ruckus of life, particularly in cities where the roar of traffic melds with rattling trains and trams and the shouted conversations of drunks and the clatter of cafés and shopping music. At a particular stage of life or mood, this can be invigorating, but mostly incessant noise is just pollution — like audible smog.
Here in suburban Shepparton, the songs of birds are drowned by mowers, blowers, snippers, drillers and sanders at the weekend.
But in the afternoon — particularly afternoons with temperatures heading north of 35°C — things can and do return to quiet.
So, it was with some trepidation we ventured to Melbourne this week for our twice-a-year medical visit. Quite why we have to make an 11-hour round trip for what is a relatively simple treatment is more than baffling. It’s annoying and expensive.
Anyway, journeying from a country town verandah to inner-city Melbourne is like travelling along a jungle river to visit Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The journey starts in tranquillity but becomes progressively louder and more unnerving as the centre of madness approaches.
We’re travelling in a tiny 15-year-old convertible BMW, so low to the ground it feels like a child’s dune buggy. The first sign of the collapsing world happens on the Goulburn Valley Hwy just past Murchison as we hit an enormous pothole that sends a juddering smash through the suspension and up into the neck and shoulders. My head lolls and my arms flail. My teeth clamp, and I wait for the taste of blood, which thankfully doesn’t come.
Then the trucks arrive: B-doubles, B-triples and road trains roaring, belching and swinging. Their spinning wheels are half a metre from my head as we pass them uphill while strips of frayed black rubber litter the roadsides — reminders of past near-death blowouts.
At Kalkallo, traffic slows to a crawl, then speeds up again as the first traffic lights appear. The patchwork of car yards and small factories and new mosques and coffee drive-throughs builds until the new fly-over station at Reservoir appears like a Star Wars spaceport, then it’s on into the maw of the tarmac, steel and glass jungle.
At a traffic light somewhere, we pick up a giant Ford Tonka toy dual cab with windows rolled down and angry doof-doof blasting out for everyone to enjoy. Look, I don’t mind someone listening to mind-numbing industrial sludge in the privacy of their car. But inflicting it on innocent passers-by in slow-moving traffic should be a crime akin to spraying cement at people.
Because I don’t have much else to do sitting in traffic waiting for lights to change, I came up with a solution. Anyone convicted of noise/cement pollution should have units fitted to their cars similar to those imposed on drunk drivers.
The offender can’t start their vehicle without first engaging the unit, which has only two choices of music to blast through speakers on the roof like emergency vehicle sirens.
Offenders can choose between 76 Trombones or Nellie The Elephant while they steer their enormous Tonka toys through the streets, giving everyone the chance to wave and join in the fun.
It’s a silly idea, but all I’m saying is — if you’re going to make noise, let it be a happy, silly noise.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News