Gold

Glenda and family had to be in Canberra today for a family commitment, so we took the opportunity to go back to Mogo and do the gold mine tour.

We had a go at panning, where you repeatedly wash through river stones and grit, to leave the gold behind in the pan. This only works because the gold is much heavier than the rest and so stays behind in the pan.

We saw the quartz-crushing machine, which reduced the quartz, and the gold therein, to dust. There was then a hazardous process involving both mercury and arsenic, to separate out the gold. Unsurprisingly, miners' life expectancy was short. The people who made the best living were the saloon keepers.

Conditions were pretty basic, for the miners anyway, the nicer buildings being the preserve of the church and the saloon. The barber was a man of many skills: tooth puller, apothecary, and (if that didn't work) undertaker.

Only 88,000 tons of gold have been mined, ever, and only about1% of that was in the form of nuggets. It is believed that there are ten million tons in the oceans, if only someone could find a sensible way of getting at it. But since gold's value depends on its scarcity, it's perhaps best they don't.

Moruya

Today the weather was perfect, 26°, clear blue skies, so we drove out to Moruya. This is a regional centre, and a substantial town by local standards, though small by ours. There is a Courthouse, the Council offices, banks, all the stuff you'd associate with a County Town in England. One broad street, Vulcan  Street, through the middle, very reminiscent of small-town America.

The name Moruya is said to be Aboriginal dialect for 'home of the black swan'. This may or may not be true, but what is true is that there is a quarry here where they sourced the granite used to build Sydney Harbour Bridge. We walked along the Moruya river for a bit; pelicans on the water, budgies in the trees, cockatoos in the shade.

The river meets the sea at Moruya Heads, so we drove down there to have a look at the beach. This is stunning: miles of flat sand, a bit of a surf up. A few kids down there after school, with short boards. The pic gives a flavour.

More anon.

Trampoline

Spent Saturday morning helping Trevor dismantle the old trampoline and swing frame, and in their place construct a new trampoline. This arrived, not from Hungary, in three heavy boxes. With much grunting, hunting for missing screws, and helpful comments from Owen, the task was accomplished by lunch time (if you stretch the definition of lunch time a bit). 

Attaching the springs was very difficult; to attach one opposite another you have to disconnect the first one, which leaves you the same problem, only the other way round. When we'd finished, out of curiosity, we had a look at the instructions, which said "this task requires two adults in good physical condition". That would be it, then.

Talking of parcels, Trevor said the Oz postal service is pretty poor. Parcels from Europe take four days, a parcel he sent to his daughter in Melbourne took ten days to get there.

Facts and figures

The area where we're staying, Bateman's Bay, is both a town and an area. The town (pop 17,500) sits at the mouth of the Clyde river, about 170 miles south of Sydney. Thought to be named for Nathaniel Bateman, captain of the HMS Nortumberland when Cook was serving as her master in the 1760s, the town has most things you need, supermarket, ATMS, petrol station, It's about 7km from Surf Beach where we're based.

The area is really a string of small towns, bays, coves, and beaches running miles to the south. There's not much in the way of industry here, being mainly a holiday and retirement area, but it seems reasonably prosperous without being flash. Most people are content with a Holden (as General Motors cars are marketed over here), but there are a few small Japanese cars, and SUVs where there is a boat in the drive. We've seen very few German cars. The whole area is heavily wooded which in nice but brings fire risk in the summer. We're at the start of autumn now so it’s pretty quiet and the roads are nearly empty.

Clubs, societies and voluntary organisations abound. My Probus chums will be interested to know there is a Probus Club in Bateman's Bay, but it's part of the Rotary. There's a picture in the local free paper showing a bunch of them, many in bush hats. You can't see their legs but I'd bet most are in shorts too. Gambling is endemic and seems to be the basis of much of the leisure industry.

They do like to trumpet the provenance of food and wine whenever it is either locally-produced, or just Australian, which much of it is. Most fruits can be grown here, and most meat is local.

Rainfall here is double that at home, but with fewer rainy days. In any given season, the temperature is probably 10 degrees higher than it would be at home. Autumn generally is the nicest season, though we seem to have hit a rainy patch this year.

The Hungarian Oven

Trevor and Glenda recently had their kitchen refitted, and a fine new AEG oven was shipped out from Hungary and installed. The only thing is, it doesn't work, but stubbornly displays the error code F136 instead. AEG say they are mystified as their error codes don't go that high. The vendor has agreed to ship out another oven so they're waiting for that, and hoping it works.

Anyway, Friday night is pizza-and-movie night, and you really need an oven for the pizzas. Glenda makes them herself, and very good they are too. The bases are made fresh by the local baker, and the mozzarella and everything else is sourced locally. They're cooked on stones, currently in the oven in our apartment; our presence complicates the numbers and means that the number of pizzas required exceeds the number of stones available, so they're being cooked in shifts, with a runner going over the road periodically to see how they're doing. This worked fine.

The movie part of the evening was The Sapphires ( basically The Commitments, only with women), and this was followed by National Rugby League, in which Manly Sea Eagles knocked lumps off Sydney City Roosters, and vice versa. Curiously, although it's a national league, there's very little Rugby League played outside of NSW and Queensland, with none at all in SA, NT, or WA.

If there is news on the oven I'll be sure to tell you.

It didn't exactly brighten up today but at least it stopped raining. We had lunch with Glenda and Trevor at the Catalina Country Club, basically a 27 hole golf club with decent catering and the inevitable pokies ( see earlier post). Had a taste of barramundi, which is a sporting fish (enjoys a game of darts I expect) and not bad either. Trevor had to go back to do his school bus run, so we drove down to Broulee to see what was going on. The surf wasn't great but there was a clutch of surfers out.

We went on to Mogo, which (if you haven't been paying attention) is an 1850s gold rush town, now largely shacks selling arts and crafts - ceramics, leather, beads,etc - some genuine, some sadly made in China. There's a bit of new age crap like tarot readings and psychic meditation as well, but we found a nice working pottery and bought a little pot to bring home.

Rain

Sydney has double the annual rainfall of London, but fewer rainy days, so when it does rain it doesn't  mess about. Today is such a day. Our neighbours are pleased, as their garden is dry, but they haven't travelled 12,000 miles to escape from weather like this. Our road, Eric Fenning Drive, is currently Eric Fenning River. I have a useful app on my iPad where I can see local and national radar and satellite views of Australia, and all the State capitals except Hobart currently have their own low pressure systems. The good news is that it's going to clear up after tomorrow.

We'd promised John we'd visit his woodwork shed - more correctly the Eurobodalla Woodcraft Guild Inc - which is at Mogo, a few miles from here, so we did. The rain was torrential, with visibility about the same as in a car wash, but we went anyway. They had lathes, belt sanders, sawing machines, all the stuff you'd expect, all financed through membership fees, sales, and odd bits of commissioned work.

Most of the timber they pick up as off cuts or find lying about. I suspect the guild is 50% social club, though, as my keen eye detected evidence of tea and cake.

Mogo itself is an old gold rush town, dating from 1851 when gold was found there. The old part of the town is preserved as a tourist attraction where you can pan for gold (you generally find a flake or two), but the town proper, with a population of 257 at the last census, has become an arts and crafts centre,  with more art galleries than many larger places. There's a pottery, and botanical gardens just along the way, so when it stops raining we'll maybe come back. 

A quiet day today. The weather's gone off a bit, in that the temperature has dropped to 21 degrees, but it's cloudy and a thunderstorm is forecast. Drove into Bateman's Bay, for a walk along the Clyde river. Interested to see the pelicans have got the day off (see earlier post).

New South Wales car registration plates bear the legend 'NSW - The First State'. Obviously there isn't room to complete the sentence '........To Be Populated Entirely By Criminals'. Mind you, you didn't have to do much to get deported in those days; in the 1750s a boy of 9 was hanged in England for stealing an apple. Quite right too, the little bastard. Hang some sense into 'em!

Black Dog Ride

Trevor rides with a biker gang (OK, he has a motorbike) and today he and Owen are off to join 300 other bikers in a charity ride. They're going from Bateman's Bay as far as Braidwood, on the way to Canberra, and back. Entry is $25 per bike, plus $15 for a passenger, so they're going to raise a decent sum. There's merchandising as well, t-shirts, caps, mugs, that sort of thing too. I wanted a t-shirt but they'd all gone. The organisation http://www.blackdogride.com.au was formed a few years ago to raise awareness of depression, and has raised over $1.1m in that time. The picture shows Trevor and Owen on their return.

Now for something completely different. 

What you notice about other countries are the little differences. Here, for example, you sometimes get a bit more service than you really need. We're partly self catering, so we go to the supermarket for provisions. The two big chains are Coles, and Woolworths, but Bateman's Bay has a Coles so we go there. It's spacious, clean, well stocked, but what seems odd to a Brit is that the cashier does your bagging for you, while you stand there doing nothing. This takes twice as long, and if they were busy a queue would build up, but fortunately there aren't enough people for that. Also, in a coffee shop you order and pay at the counter, but you take a table number and the barista eventually brings your order over. It's a bit slow, but then life is more relaxed here.

The fauna are quite different here. There are parrots in trees, and every lamp post on the road into Bateman's Bay has a pelican sitting on it. These are big birds, with indiscriminate bowel habits, so don't stand below, that's all I'm saying.

The grassy bit between your house and the road is not the verge, it's the nature strip. My hire car is currently standing on Trevor's.

There is a free health service, but you have to pay for an ambulance. You can mitigate the cost through insurance, or you can get yourself to hospital under your own steam, but otherwise the cost can be substantial. Glenda's other grandson, who is in his 20s and lives in Canberra, recently needed to get to A&E after an incident in the street, and it cost $800 for the ambulance and paramedics.

This is a huge country with a relatively small population, so there is loads of space. The roads are broad, traffic is light, houses and gardens are spacious, parking is easy, queues are rare, and life generally more relaxed. The down side is that every journey is a long one: Trevor drives a school bus morning and afternoon in term time, covering 186km each day. This is the equivalent of Worthing to Southampton and back, every day.

More anon.

Scenic tour

Trevor took us out today to see the local scenery. First stop was Bodalla, the centre of the local dairy industry, and renowned for its cheese. There is a cheese factory there, with cheese tasting; many of the cheeses are Cheddar-style, but with the addition of thyme, or other local herbs.

The scenery was as close to Sussex as anything we've seen, with fields, ponds, cows. The pic gives the flavour

We moved on to Tuross Head, a promontory with spectacular surfing beaches either side, as well as volcanic rocks.

We had lunch at the Tuross Country Club, essentially a golf and bowls club crossed with a sports bar, set high above the sea. What is noticeable over here is the prominence of gaming machines: a whole area is given over to the provision of moronic ways of wasting your money. Pokies, or poker machines, are apparently the most addictive, and the subject of much political debate. In the end it comes down to economics - without the profits the machines provide the club would not be viable. There simply isn't the population density for a gaming-free club to be viable. The suckers lining up to be fleeced are performing a vital public service.

The School fete

We went to Owen's school fete today, at Broulee. This, as I said earlier, is a big deal as they only hold it every two years, and by the next time Owen will have moved on.

Think a British school fete, then imagine you have good weather and endless space, and you're there. There are hundreds of stalls, from home baking, to an open mic for school talent, an outdoor brick pizza oven ($3 a slice), face painting, raffles, rides, and many more. My favourite was the teacher-dunking machine, pictured

For $1 you get three baseballs which you throw at he paddle. A direct hit dunks the teacher. This was a very popular attraction.

More soon

Come to my shed

This morning John, who owns the flat we're in, popped round to ask if I'd like to come to his shed. This is not as sinister as it sounds: shed, in this context, means something close to hobby and craft club. John's is a woodworking club, where he and others, including women, make, and collaborate on,  wooden artefacts. His house contains several that he has made himself - tables, bowls, that sort of thing - all from local pine and cedar, as well as anything else lying about. The quality is very high, but pride of place goes to a model of Cologne Cathedral, made by a German guy and his wife. This contains stunning detail and moving parts. The picture does not really do it justice, but gives you an idea

They actually made two, one of which John has, the other raffled by the club, raising. $1000. The man who won it, took it home, only for his wife to say 'that's not coming in here', so it's being re-raffled.

Anyway, we were already committed today, but we've agreed to go next week.

Today we drove down the coast to Bermagui, a little town 100km to the south of here, accessed via a rickety wooden bridge. There's a small marina there, and nearby a Marine Park, plus quite a lot of holiday properties and eateries. You don't pass through very many inhabited places to get there, but there are road signs pointing to small towns with names suggestive of aboriginal origins: Lillii Pilli, Illawang, Noggarula - you get the idea. 

The pic shows Mrs A at the bay.

Tomorrow, we're going to Owen's school fete (Owen is Glenda's 11 year old grandson, who lives with them). This is a biennial event, and apparently quite a big deal in the area, so we're looking forward to that.

Canberra

We're staying at the Mercure where, it turns out, under its earlier name of Olims, Pat's friend Glenda married Trevor 20 years ago. Small world?

This is the Federal capital, in its own territory (ACT), itself wholly within NSW. Selected in the early 1900s as a compromise between the rival claims of Sydney and Melbourne, it is built around Lake Burley Griffin, after the American architect who designed the city. Like most Aussie cities there is plenty of space and parkland, and mainly low-rise buildings. Unusually for a national capital, it has no international airport: any visiting dignitary has to fly into Sydney or Melbourne, and transfer.

Here's a thing. Imagine if Tesco charged you £1 for a trolley but only gave you 10p back. Canberra airport charge you $2 for a luggage trolley, and will give you 20c back if you return it to where you got it from. Most people don't bother to take it back at all, but leave it in the car park, reckoning that 20p is a reasonable fee to have someone else do it for them. So the car park is littered with trolleys where once people happily retuned them to the designated bay. Brilliant.

Spent a couple of hours going round the very impressive Australian War Memorial, in memory of the hundreds of thousands of Aussies who have died in various conflicts. I knew they'd fought on our side in various European wars but I had no idea they were so close to being invaded themselves, by the Japanese. Darwin was bombed several times and even Sydney was shelled from the sea.

We picked up the hire car and drove down to the coast, a two and a half hour journey. Maximum speed limit anywhere in NSW is 100km/hr, or about 65 mph, and given the roads are good and largely empty, it's very frustrating. Speed limits are enforced enthusiastically, with severe penalties so it's best to play safe. Canberra is quite high and there are hairpin bends with limits of 25km/hr, and it's almost impossible to go that slowly. 

Fire is an ever-present danger here, evidenced by the blackened trees along the road. Most trees here are eucalyptus, which burns a treat. One species, the white gum, when stressed, sheds limbs. Whole branches just fall off. So if you see a harassed looking white gum, don't stand underneath it, would be my advice.

First glimpse of the sea about 5pm. More anon

Saturday, came down to breakfast to find 200 blonde airheads in full squawk in the lobby. Turns out there's a skin care conference on. As the elderly Aussie in the queue for the unhealthy breakfast choices muttered darkly " hubby won't be getting his tea tonight". The spirit of the 50s alive and well in South Australia, then.

We ate at an Italian last night, outside given the weather had improved. At the next table were a man and woman, with passers-by pausing to wish him good luck for tomorrow. One called him Mr Parnell so, guessing that might be his name, I googled him when we got back. Turns out he was Mark Parnell, the first Green representative in SA to be elected to the State Legislature, whose term was up and was hoping to be re-elected. Obviously his main support base is the festival-attending, Italian-food-eating demographic.

Went to the zoo this afternoon to see the giant pandas. The picture shows Wang Wang, the male of the pair, who conveniently strolled across to me when he saw the camera.

Tomorrow after lunch we're flying to Canberra, for one night, after which we're driving down to Surf Beach. More anon

Adelaide

We arrived here Friday morning having flown overnight from Singapore. No sleep en route as the guy in the seat behind us coughed all night, so not feeling on top form.

First impressions of Adelaide: everyone seems very young, something I've commented on before in Australian cities. The Aussies welcome migrants, and have pretty much renewed their gene pool over two generations. Downtown, where we are, is a grid system, with free trams. Our hotel is in a pedestrianised bit, and the Adelaide Festival is about to start, so there's a lot of bustle going on. The bad news is that it's cloudy and rain is expected later.

It's a small(ish) city of 1.2 million, and dates back to the 1820s when it was founded as a colony for free migrants, as opposed to convicts. Fans of Aussie place names, where they name something after it's most obvious feature (the Great Sandy Desert, for example) will enjoy the local attraction Mount Lofty. In WA there's a Lake Disappointment, which is nice, as well as a Shark Bay, which must do wonders for the holiday trade.

There's a zoo, which we may visit tomorrow, which has the only giant pandas in the Southern Hemisphere. I'll post a pic or two if possible - wifi here is free but sooooo slow....

Singapore

Well we arrived here last night. We're staying at he Park Regis, just for the night.

Today it's 32 degrees, as it usually is. We're pretty much on the equator here so there are no distinct seasons, though the humidity varies from very high, to even higher.

If you ignore the climate you could be at home. Everything, literally, is in English: street names, road signs, the adverts on the side of buses, all in English. Which is odd, because of the 5m people who live here 75% are ethnic Chinese. English is spoken by around half the population.

Nominally a democracy, the same party has ruled since independence in 1959. No doubt the trains run on time, but crime is almost non-existent. Possibly this is because of the fierce punishments imposed. For example, littering is punishable by beheading. (If it's a first offence. Do it again and you're really in trouble.) Or possibly it's because everyone has a job and a roof over their head. Who can say?

We're only here for a few hours, so we're going to check out the orchids* at the Botanical Gardens, by recommendation. This evening we fly to Adelaide, where we arrive tomorrow morning. More exciting news anon.

*Did you know the word orchid derives from the Greek 'orchis', meaning testicle?