Around the world, people know Australia for several reasons. For starters, we’re known for our general friendliness. We’re the kind of people you want to meet when you’re touring through Asia. We’re also known for our, uh, rowdiness. If that’s what you want to call it. But honestly? I think the main reason we’re known probably has nothing to do with people at all, and everything to do with our flora and fauna.
I say this as I stare at my flower wallpaper, the one I’ve got plastered on the walls of my bedroom. It’s filled with a pattern of beautiful little flowers of so many different colours, shapes and sizes. And the truth is that even though I’ve had this wallpaper on my walls since I was about ten years old, I still don’t know the name of a single flower on it. Should I be embarrassed? I think I’m a little bit embarrassed. But I also don’t know where to start looking.
This wallpaper is pretty outdated; it wasn’t a prepasted one, like all those modern ones you can buy in the best home decoration stores nowadays. It wasn’t even a peel-and-stick. It was one of those ones with the strips, where you had to put the glue on yourself and then paste it on your walls. Luckily, I was pretty young when it was applied to my walls, so my parents did it for me while I sat and watched in glee.
I searched online for Australian botanical wallpaper a little while ago to see if I could find pictures of it entrenched in some sort of ancient website somewhere, but there seems to be no evidence that the store we supposedly bought the paper from even existed at all. My next option is to take a photo of the wallpaper and post it to social media for amateur experts to identify the flowers. Perhaps that should have been my first option, since I know I’m going to get an answer that way, but I can’t help but feel like this way was more of an adventure.