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.