Taxi

We're in Sydney now. We drove the 200-odd miles through varied NSW countryside. The satnav would have sent us up the coast road, but Trevor gave us a better route, going inland via Braidwood and Goulburn, and on to the Hume Highway (this goes 807km from Melbourne to Sydney, but we were only on it for 100 miles or so). 

Braidwood, or 'historic' Braidwood, as it calls itself, has an air of the Wild West about it. It's quite high up, too, and chilly. The road between there and Goulburn, you could have been in England, with sheep and cows grazing. Some alpaca too, I think. Actually, not really like England at all, then.

We dropped off the hire car at the airport and got a taxi to our hotel, at Darling Harbour. My spirits were not raised when the driver, who had possibly just stepped off the boat from Bangladesh, asked me if I knew the way. I explained, as politely as I could, how the driver/passenger relationship normally works, and silence ensued. We got there eventually.

Tomorrow, all being well, we're going to Taronga Zoo, which involves a series of ferries. Hope I'm not asked to navigate.

Oven news

Word has been received from Hungary that a replacement oven has been dispatched. Pending its arrival, pizza-and-movie night worked the same as last week, the pizzas cooking in shifts in our apartment, and being eaten at Glenda's, over the road.

The film tonight was Fantastic Mr Fox (excellent) and the Rugby League was Sydney City Roosters versus Canterbury Bulldogs. That's Canterbury the suburb of Sydney, not the one with the archbishop, by the way.

In the morning we drive up to Sydney to drop off the car and spend a couple of nights there.

More soon.

Bushrangers

Went to Nelligen today. This is a small town ( pop 228) on the banks of the Clyde river. There's not much there, just a few dwellings and a small trade servicing the tour boats on the Clyde which make a brief stop there. It's very picturesque.

In the 1860s, in the height of the gold rush, gangs of bushrangers operated in the area, robbing shipments of gold, and generally upsetting the peace. They were most likely Australian-born descendants of the original convicts brought here in the 1780s.

The most famous was Ned Kelly, but the most bloody were the Clarke Brothers, Thomas and John, who were said to be responsible for 36 robberies and 5 murders. They were cornered in 1866 by militia aided by Aboriginal trackers,

and chained to this tree (above) to await the boat to Sydney (there were no roads back then) where they were executed in June 1867. Their notoriety led to the passing of legislation authorising citizens to kill criminals on sight.

Australian attitudes to bush ranging were not all hostile. Some saw it as romantic, with a touch of Robin Hood about it. The Victoria state cricket team's adopted nickname of Bushrangers highlights this ambivalence. Anyway, that's today's lesson over. 

Saw an unusual sight this morning: an SUV towing a boat. Not very unusual, you might think? Well, the boat was fixed to the front of the car and was being pushed. Not entirely legal, I suspect, even here.

Geology

Jeez it's a hot one, as they say around here.

Went for a swim this morning, revelling in the fact that the temperature, 29°, was likely to be as warm as anything we get in Worthing this year. Plus it's autumn here.

I got talking to an elderly lady who was collecting stones off the beach, and she showed me some pumice she'd just picked up. Pumice is cooled lava, but there are no volcanos around here. She said that it had probably come from an undersea eruption off the North Island of New Zealand a couple of years ago. 

The next beach along, Denhams Beach, has cliffs at the back whose rock formations bear witness to some serious seismic activity in the past. There are striations going in all directions, with all sorts of different minerals in evidence, sandstone, iron, quartz, basalt, to name but a few, as well as sedimentary deposits (sands and grits) forced into any vacant spaces. According to Wikipedia this seismic activity occurred over the last 500 million years.

I've added a couple of pics (one of which is now my desktop background) to give you an idea. The orange is sandstone, the black iron, the paler colours quartz, and so on.

Australia is a paradise for mineral prospectors; practically the whole country is begging to be exploited for its precious metals and gems. Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart, a piece of work by all accounts, is the most successful of the plunderers. As a harmless Guardian-reading herbivore, I'm naturally appalled. On the other hand, my iPad wouldn't work without gold, silver, copper, and rare earth metals like niobium, beryllium and neodymium, and then you wouldn't be able to read this. So, I take a nuanced view.

 

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.