Bye Bicheno (or au revoir ?)

Well it is time to hit the road again ! I cannot believe that we have been here in Bicheno for four months, the time really has flown. We have truly enjoyed working in the caravan park, I can't pretend that cleaning toilets would be my chosen career path, but it proved an excellent means to an end, and I knew all that university education would come in handy one day. The crew here has been an absolute pleasure to work with, and one hopes that it will be possible to stay in touch with Geoff and Vicki, Steven and Sandy, Bev and Carmen, John and Chris. Some people talk of Freycinet Peninsular, or Mt Wellington, or Lake St Clair, but for me the highlight of Tasmania has been Carmen's cakes. From Bicheno we have criss-crossed the island, and are constantly meeting Taswegians who have seen only a fraction of the places we have. Next week it will be a quickie circumnavigation of Tassie with Mum and Dad, then Daylesford for a bit, then the Nullabor. One of our neighbours told me about his drive to WA in 1960, when it was dirt road all the way, which he did in his Morris 1000, with 6 spare tyres strapped to the roof. Another piped in with a story of his crossing last year, when circumstances forced him to share the driving with a friend, and to drive non-stop. Apparantly the road kill was so numerous, that it was only possible to drive at 50 km/h at night to avoid hitting the dead cows. I think that we might stick to daytime driving !

Wild West

We've been asked to work over easter, so when we were given four days holiday within our holiday, we went west young man. We sped past a coal powered, smoke belching monstrosity on our way to the roaring forties wind farm, and the contrast was dramatic to say the least. The threat to the avian population from the rotating bird slicers is so great that we had to be warned about the presence of eagles on the road outside the wind farm. The western half of the island is the least developed, the wettest, the windiest and the most scenic. A local brochure suggests that the scenery has more in common with that of New Zealand than with the rest of Australia. We have been a little hampered by driving a hybrid car (now 45,208 kilometres on the trip, @ a reducing 5.8 litres / 100 kms )and some of the western highways are really only suitable for 4x4's We did however visit the Tarkine wilderness, although did not attempt the famous 'road to nowhere' and we did some bushwalking in the Walls of Jeruselem national park. It has been a pleasant surprise to see some of Tassies famous wildlife alive and well rather than squashed at the side of the road. A going away party has been organised for the 29th of this month, and after a week with Mum and Dad in Tassie, next stop is Perth ! (maybe)

love me doo

Yesterday we drove through the little village of Doo Town, a group of shacks rather than a town to tell the truth (they do like their shacks those Tasmanians). But the habitants of Doo Town have distinguished themselves by naming their modest abodes with deliberately mispelt variations on the doo theme. Here are a few examples, let it not be said that Tasmanian don't have a can doo attitude!

After all this excitement, we dropped in for a welcome cup of tea at the lovely bush block of our friends Sandy and Steve.

Some blogs go viral - ours has gone fungal

The season of mellow fruitfulness has arrived, and with it, hundred of weird and wonderful fungi. Cecile has read somewhere that only one per cent of all fungi are poisonous, and would like to give some of those mushrooms a turn in the kitchen. David is still struggling with the idea that good food comes out of soil rather than a factory, is reluctant.

At this time of the year,Alison Pouliot at Daylesford's neighbourhood center runs a "know your wild mushrooms course", and Cecile is determined to enroll a.s.a.p., and put her knowledge into practice.

Meanwhile, can you guess which one of the vegetative forms pictured here is a danger to human life?

Thug Culture

I understand that Itha Butthrose has written a new book on etiquette. I am not going to read it. Life is too short to read books by Itha Butthrose. I am sure that it is full of useful information enabling you to attack the serious social problems one might face. For example, when confronted with the 3rd in line to the Duchess of Westminster, and a gold logie winner, to whom would you first pass the cucumber sandwiches ? In promoting her new opus Itha has done the usual chatshows, and I was unfortunate to catch one of these the other morning whilst waiting for the cricket score. As my hand moved towards the off button (no remotes in rural Tassie) I did hear the suggestion that perhaps we should all consider being a little more polite to one another. Not a bad idea.

This morning, I was cleaning the 'top' amenities block at the holiday park. A permanent sign outside says 'These amenities are closed for cleaning between ten o'clock and eleven o'clock ' When I commence my work, I put a small yellow board at the entrance which says 'Amenities closed for cleaning' As I went to a trolley for some rags, a young girl walked passed me, stepped over my sign and walked into one of the cubicles. I said "Excuse me, but I am cleaning that" She grasped the knob on her side of the door, and started to pull it closed behind her while saying " I only want a shower" I grabbed the knob on the outside of the door, and we commenced to have a rather undignified tug of war. I won. I explained that there were other showers in the park, and giving up the struggle, she composed her face into a look which would have curdled milk, and marched purposefully in the direction of the office. I should'nt have been surprised. Her behaviour did however put me in mind of a couple of other examples of thug culture which we have observed during our trip.

We went to Campbelltown the other day, a nice little heritage truck stop on route number one, and were sitting in an outside dining area having a bowl of soup. On the nature strip on the far side of the road, a group of youngsters were servicing an ancient commodore. One of them had his head down under the bonnet, and was removing the spark plugs. His mate standing next to him received the old plugs and handed the mechanic the new ones. Holding the old spark plugs in his hand the mate then turned and torpedo punted the used plugs into the middle of the highway. Being a commodore, he did this six times. He looked mighty pleased with himself too.

When we were in the Northern Territory, we spent an afternoon at Manton Dam, which used to provide drinking water for Darwin, but which has now been superceded by the much bigger Darwin river dam. Manton has now been turned into a very attractive recreational area, with fishing and boating facilities. We arrived at a lawned area at the side of the lake and noticed a group of four young people sitting on a groundsheet. As we stood there, the two couples stood up, and one of the young fellows turned on a ghetto blaster, which had up to that moment been silent. The volume was very loud, and music amorphous, ga ga ish techno crap. The four of them proceeded to walk to their jetskis, and blast off in the direction of the opposite side of the lake, leaving us deafened by duff duff.

I have been surprised recently by the criticism which has been heaped upon poor Brendan Fevola. Here is a man who urinates on other people, and himself, assaults innocent bystanders, drunkenly pukes in public, and loses a kings ransom on the pokies, weekly. I think that he is genuinely representative of the best that our culture has to offer, and am confident that he would make the sort of Governor General of whom we might all be proud.

The pictures are of the floods at Bicheno. 28-1456 appears courtesy of a computer virus, which I have explained to Cecile, Norton is unable to eradicate.