On 11 March we became Australian citizens. Which means we never have to leave!
The ceremony itself was a rather peculiar affair which reminded me a little of my graduation. It was one of those peculiarities of local government that's obviously a regular and not insignificant event but which has to somehow stay fresh for the regular participants and might occasionally struggle a little to do so. Migration is a serious contributor to Australia's population and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics consistently exceeds natural growth so these ceremonies must be pretty frequent.
The mayor of Randwick presented the certificates and another councilor acted as MC. There were various community members there to represent wider society including quite a few (elderly) former servicemen. For what could be quite a stuffy and tedious affair it was handled quite well and was quite touching in it's earnest sincerity - which I should have expected - formal without being stuffy.
When you arrive at the ceremony you have to go and put your name on the electoral roll (sensibly, voting is compulsory here) and are directed to your seat, on which rests a bag of goodies. It contains:
A welcome note from your new federal MP
An information leaflet from the Australian electoral commission and,
Sydney is a city with more than its fair share of contemporary architectural oddities but there is one I encounter almost every working day and so stands out from the sci-fi inspired towers and glass blocks. It’s not obvious, it’s not always even apparent and I am almost certain that it is an accident of design.
The gently concave shape of the Sheraton overlooking Darling harbour, combined with its mirrored windows and westerly aspect, mean that in the afternoon and early evening the sunlight is reflected and focussed at a particular (hot)spot on the pathway across the road. As I walk past this on my way home, depending on the weather, I am either gently warmed or subject to quite intense heat from the presumably unintentional solar furnace. Remarkably you can actually see this effect on the aerial photograph in the map after the jump (only you can't any more because Google have updated the photo - bugger).
Sydney does some things very well, this is one of them. Sculpture by the Sea is an annual event along the coast between Bondi and Tamarama that showcases modern sculpture - these are the good ones...
HOLLYWOOD studios and record labels are being forced to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new way of combating online piracy after the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers are not required to police copyright infringement on their networks.
The music industry says it may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file sharing unless the federal government intervenes with a solution to its piracy woes.
Let's just look at the last sentence there. Read it again. What it says is that a large, rich industry that holds almost more copyrights than any other is asking for Government protection because it feels unable to defend its' property and is taking the passive-aggressive line that if it doesn't get it then it will have to sue individuals. If you sue an ISP for "authorising" illegal downloading you may as well sue the power companies as well. After all they provided the electricity, they knew people might be doing it with the electricity they supplied and they too failed to monitor if people were or were not doing so. Suing individuals is what they should have been doing in the first place, they don't want to because individuals are the customers.
If you have rights, responsibilities come with them. In law when you hold a copyright and you wish to continue to hold on to it you are obliged to defend it. It is not the job of federal government or anyone else - with the possible exception of a an industry body with careful oversight - to police your rights for you. You can report rights violations as a crime and then the actual police will step in.
Warning: it's going to get a bit dull and polemic after this so I've put the rest behind the read more link
After a year's gap and at about the third attempt we finally managed to swim with whalesharks this time last week. I'll put some pics up when I have them developed and'or I can work out how to pinch stills from a DVD.
Also I am not dead, I was merely on holiday. That is all.
13 February was been a big day for Australia. The Prime Minister officially apologised to the Stolen Generations. This term refers to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live either with white foster parents or in camps governed by white people. This was a nationwide and state-by-state policy in Australia ostensibly to protect children at risk of harm but in fact enforced as a brutal piece of 'ethnic cleansing' and out and out racism as has been seen at any time in history. It lasted a hundred years or more.
Apologising for this atrocity has been a sticking point with governments ever since the idea was suggested. A large part of white Australia feels that it has nothing to apologise for; that Aboriginal people do nothing but drink, sniff petrol and laze around. Apologising to indigenous people for Australians of this viewpoint is feeding a victim mentality and validating the perceived lack of endeavour. This is, obviously to me, ignoring the fact that the parlous state of a lot of indigenous communities is a result of the interference of another culture.
This is not to ignore that child abuse, alcoholism and petrol sniffing are immense problems in many indigenous communities. These are symptoms of much bigger problems to do with poverty arising from the treatment of the indigenous population. A distributed hunter-gatherer culture had a concentrated capital economic white culture imposed on it that attempted to force its own values to the fore, removing autonomy and self-determination along the way. This was also done without providing a framework for development or progress – i.e. opportunity to access education and employment – without which many of these communities lapsed into third-world level poverty where they remain today. The average indigenous life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of the white population.
There are reasons for this too; many indigenous communities are very remote making it very difficult to provide these opportunities even when the impetus to do so is present (from either side of the equation). The traditional ways of living, which supported these communities in the past, had been devalued and eroded by the encroaching culture, hopelessness and an apathetic helpless inertia was the result.
It is against this background that one federal MP when asked whether he supported an apology commented on camera that there were places in Australia where he thought children should be removed from their parents (his emphasis).
Nice one Kev
The wording of the apology needed to be right. Australians of any background are straight talking honest people and any half-hearted effort would have rendered the exercise pointless for absolutely everyone. The word sorry was particularly important as an apology can be without regret and regret as well as recognition of the past ills are what was needed. In the photograph is Sally Pierce who was herself removed from her parents. For years she has worn a black tee shirt with the word Sorry on it, after the PM’s speech she changed it.
Below I’ve included a couple of things, some thinking on what the apology might mean from the Special Broadcasting Service, a video of the PM’s speech, the full text of it and some reactions to the speech again from SBS.
Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.
My coverage of the federal election here hasn't been what I'd hoped but buying a flat and changing job roles seem to have got in the way of it a bit. However, it is election day in Oz and so I shall be going to go surfing all day and then to a party in the evening as I am not elligible to vote.
Australia's electoral practices are far more progressive than a lot of other westernised nations. All citizens have to vote, even if overseas a plane ticket actually has to be produced to avoid a substantial fine. Australia also uses a proportional representation system in which voters order the candidates to match their preference (a 1 for the first choice, 2 for the second etc.).
For some arcane reason that I don't really understand some seats in the senate are also being decided and for these you can either order the candidates or just put a 1 in a box for your party of choice. You can actually practice voting at the Australian Electoral COmmission's website.
If you're worried about the lack of sanity evidenced by writing about politics at 3 in the morning don't worry. I was woken by a bizarre noise from next door that sounded like an entire skelton being dropped on a hard surface from a great height. Worry about that instead.
I was covering the Australian election from an TV/internet and ex-pat perspective when all of a sudden having a life got in the way. Oh yes, and the whole thing became really tedious.
We've had more of the same from both sides. Liberals first:
And now Labor:
We've also seen some genuine thinking by the two main parties. Liberals first, again playing to their economic record versus that of the oposition and doing so against the background of an interest rate rise (the first ever during a general election campaign in Australia):
Labor's latest plays to the uncertainty of electing a Prime Minister who will be stepping down soon (Howard said yesterday that he would probably be in office for at least 18 months):
To give you a taste of what it's actually like here if you're reading from outside Australia all of these video embeds are on television here. You can't get through an ad break without seeing at least two of them.
Street canvassers have been at a minimum and I am grateful that an English accent can give you the instant get-out of not being able to vote. I can't help feeling that with 10 days to go something a bit more dramatic ought to be happening. The fact that it isn't is probably because both of the parties set out their stalls pretty early on and have stuck to their guns pretty doggedly.
Some spending plans were announced on Monday from the Liberals but Labor doesn't seem to have done quite the same thing and in the interest of research and reasonable comparison I'll go through those later in the week.
At the weekend a worm caused a storm in a teacup. The worm in question is not a political candidate but a screen graphic used by Channel 9 to measure public approval of candidates. It takes the form of a line at the bottom of the screen that changes colour and tracks up and down an onscreen graph based on the real time electronic voting of a studio audience of undecided voters.
The storm in a teacup was because Channel 9 did not have permission to use this under the rules the National Press Club applied to allocate broadcast rights of the debate between Kevin Rudd and John Howard. They used it anyway and the NPC killed their feed. Channel 9 then switched to rebroadcasting ABC's feed with the worm patched over the top and claimed that the Press Club had bowed to pressure from the Government in killing their feed and called it a violation of free speech.
Almost everyone is ignoring this non-story except the two broadcasters involved and the international press who love a claim of free speech violation. Channel 9 may not have had permission to use the worm but do they really need permission? The damn thing was more of a distraction than anything, particularly if, like me, you had absolutely no idea what it was.
Oddly though Channel 9 had a news crew inside the online production suite; not something you do without good reason. Might they have had an inkling that this was going to happen and have actually bent the rules deliberately in a cynical ploy to gain ratings? Surely not.
The worm was an issue because John Howard does not fare well under the gimmick. He had only been on screen 3 seconds when the graph(ic) went into a negative reading from Rudd's immediately positive reading. The worm being left out of the broadcast was almost certainly part of the negotiations to actually get a debate aired. Rudd had wanted 3 debates, Howard has cleverly agreed to only one.
Cleverly because Howard is a very professional and polished politician with 11 years practice at being PM. People know who he is and his extempore speaking seems natural, he appears to know what he's talking about even when he is winging it. Rudd is not a familiar face nor do people necessarily feel they know what he's about. There is an air of Blair about him, although he is much less creepy and seems more genuine. Actually on those criteria he's nothing like Tony Blair but you take my point.
Rudd used the time well outlining policy and using phrases like "what my party stands for", "what I would do in office" etc. but on balance I'd have to give the debate to Howard. The PM consulted his notes far less, seemed more composed and didn't make the error of breaking eye contact with the camera or the person posing a question when he had finished talking, which Rudd did. Phone polls by the broadcasters and the newspapers broadly agree with me. Political analysts though split the honours evenly, citing Rudd's better use of detail and Howard's slight hesitancy on reconcilliation with Aboriginal people and troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The worm firmly gave the debate to Rudd. If the audience really was composed of undecided voters then Howard may not be the totem he once was. This election is going to be a hard faught one in the marginal seats and if Howard provokes disapproval just by appearing on screen then he is going to need something extra. For me though the debate was proof that Howard is still tough and definitely more than a contender. [lazy joke about electorate being worm that turned goes here]
I either have astonishing reach and influence or a talent for stating the blindingly obvious. Today’s video clip is the Liberal Party response to the Labor response to the Liberal unions campaign ad.
As the dominant narrative of the moment the election has considerable use as a marketing too if you can get in people's heads. The election has been expected for so long that companies and their agencies have had plenty of time to prepare and as a media meme an election is all pervasive. Commercial ad campaigns are beginning to mirror the political one.
Apologies, I haven’t actually watched the video above, I’m at work and can’t be bothered. It’s probably Howard saying that he’s not scaremongering but engaged in informing the public about the potential unionist content of a Labor cabinet that would mean the thin end of the wedge for [small] businesses. He probably says something about flexibility in employment and industrial relations and taxes too.
I have noticed from the front page that the theme of embedding your rival’s advert in your own is continuing. Will we also then see this repeated so that by the time a government is elected you will be able to trace the story backwards by finding the adverts referenced in each clip? Has that actually been the case and are you reviewing this post 6 weeks from now tracing things backwards to see how Australia ended up with a naked PM? Interesting.
For speed, and appropriateness of response the Liberals score some points here but this is a definite ‘me too’ advert. It’s the same thing without a jacket (I reserve the right to change my opinion after having watched the video, but I doubt I'll have to).
The first blows in the election campaign fell early in the week. Things are going to move quickly of necessity, 6 weeks is not long to win hearts and minds especially when people already have a well formed impression of your party. Possibly this is why I was a little disappointed with the standard of the opening salvo.
The Liberal Party, rather predictably, weighed in to Labor for its’ Union connections, as it has been doing for the last month.
The move was so predictable in fact that Labor had a reply ready to go which was posted on their website within half an hour of the Liberal ad going live.
Perhaps it is a little early to expect innovation. The Labor – yes, that is the correct spelling here as wrong as it looks – political movement has been linked to Unions since its’ inception (in Australia 1891). That the Labor front bench might contain unionists seems a little obvious.
Whilst the ad is very polished and hammers its’ point home with the requisite force it has opened up with a negative, attacking the opposition not starting from a positive. The Liberals have plenty of positive at their disposal, unemployment is at the lowest rate for 33 years, the Australian economy is booming and the Government is in a position to offer big tax cuts and arguably still manage spending. Why not remind people of that? The polls say they've forgotten.
Strange too that it was left to the Treasurer and deputy PM to launch the advert. Costello is a credible financial manager and is most likely to succeed Howard as PM in the medium term. Immediately before the election was called the Liberal party suddenly had a tizzy fit about who would lead, and for a while it looked like Howard might not be fighting the election as leader. The party eventually decided to hold on to Howard but what does that say about the election prospects of ‘Captain Smirk’? If Costello is not seen as strong enough to win an election and Howard has said he will step down in the not too distant future who exactly are Liberal voters voting for? And, more importantly, why associate this problem so closely with the opening of your campaign?
Howard is notably and noticeably absent from Liberal advert as is mention of any Liberal politicians or policies. Rudd’s response was concise - perhaps overly so - and personal. In a country still so conservative in outlook that any and all newsreaders appear behind desks for even the briefest of bulletins Rudd was perched on the front of a desk with a TV remote in his hand talking to the camera with an easy non-threatening manner (not that I suspect he is capable of being very threatening). It builds on the media created notion of the election as Rudd vs. Howard and it shows Rudd as the voice of his party. The image of the much shorter John Howard trying to perch on a desk flickered briefly through my mind. Rather unkindly I wondered if his feet would touch the ground. I expect Rudd on his desk to become a motif of the campaign.
The two countries that I have lived in for any substantial time are both gearing up for a general election; one definitely and soon, the other probably and not until next year. All being well with visas I will have the peculiar sensation of watching the Australian election, that I cannot vote in, from the perspective of living in the country and in the new year watching a British election which I could vote in, from the other side of the world.
In my native Britain the sitting Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would be seeking the validation of having won an election on his own merits, having inherited leadership from Tony Blair, but has ruled this out until 2009 saying that he 'needs more time to lay out his vision'. Brown had considered an Autumn election and has faced criticism for leaving the country in suspense about his intentions, most notably from his deputy.
In Australia, where I currently live, the Liberal coalition will be seeking another term in office to return the 10 year veteran of the top job, John Howard, for only a few years before he steps down in favour of, who we don't quite know but probably the current treasurer, Peter Costello.
In both counties questions were being asked about when the election would actually be called. As the Head of State for Australia is in fact Queen Elizabeth II, John Howard is obliged to get permission from the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call an election; something he flew back to Canberra to do this weekend. I have just learnt from the BBC News website whilst doing a light bit of research for this post that he has, as expected, called an election to for the 24th of November.
Howard had been expected to call an election before now and his reluctance to do so has caused some bitter acusations from the Labor opposition. The accusations are that the Australian Federal Government is using its' advertising privilidge to market government policies and the delay in calling an election was to allow these to run their full course before polling day. There does seem to be some weight to this argument given the noticeable increase in frequency of these adverts on the TV every time a poll comes out favoring Labor and a definite slant in the advertising towards selling the legislation rather than telling people how it works.
The major election campaigning issues which I may do further posts on are going to be:
Work Choices and employment law (unpopular - favouring opposition)
Australian involvement in Iraq (unpopular - favouring opposition)
Assistance for drought areas (popular - favouring government)
Cuerrent economic position (popular - favouring government)
Ongoing climate change preparation (varying but mostly favouring the opposition)
Aboriginal and indigenous affairs (varing and impossible to place also a latecomer to the party)
Howard vs Rudd - it might come to punches, which speccy nerd will you be cheering for?
The last and probably the critical issue is who can maintain credibility not just personally but throughout their party and their campaign. This is going to be tricky as Howard has probably the greatest credibility of any Australian politician and is a real political street fighter with a knack for finding vulnerabilities his oponents didn't know they had.
Rudd has weathered a few storms on this front with his wife effectively being forced to sell her interest in the Australian arm of the business she runs, and Rudd having a boozy night in a New York strip club in his past revealed. Rudd should not be underestimated though. He might, as Dame Edna Everidge(CBE) pointed out, look like a dentist but he is also a former diplomat with postings in Stockholm and Beijing. During the APEC summit Rudd was able to address the chinese delegation in fluent Mandarin. The night in a strip club story only made him look human and has actually strengthened his position.
This is going to be a tough fought election that has another interesting aspect to it. Every party has embraced the internet as a campaigning tool. Google are running campaign channels on YouTube for all the parties and have an Election 2007 tab for their very popular homepage. Both of the main parties have been using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook for a while. This is going to be Australia's first real internet friendly election.
I was actually doing some work on the internet, for a bit of a change, when there was a flash and a KABOOM and the connection fried. A very sudden and extremely powerful thunderstorm wafted through and interupted every transmitter for miles. Not even the phone worked.
The connection is now so erratic I am writing this in short bursts. This occasionally happens here, it's one of the hazards of living right on the Pacific ocean. A year or two before I came to Sydney there was a hailstorm that spat chunks of ice the size of a softball from the sky. It hasn't done that yet but I wouldn't want to be outside in it.
With the APEC summit about to happen in Sydney and an opportunity for Australia to showcase its' position as a real economic and political player on the global stage the biggest news story over here at the moment is obviously going to be about a drug taking rugby player.
Last weekend Andrew Johns was arrested in London with an ecstasy tablet in his possession. That's right, one tablet. This is surprisingly convenient for him as if you get caught with one tablet in the UK you can say it's for personal use, if you get nicked with even only one more than that you get done for possession with intent to supply. A man of Johns' size, and apparently considerable experience with controlled substances, will probably want more than one pill to get his rocks off all night. Someone, possibly someone wearing a blue uniform, has done him a big favour and stepped on the rest.
Johns has pleaded that he has been battling bi-polar disorder and that he was using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, something his doctor almost certainly told him not to do. For a start alcohol is a depressant and won't really work, the drinking experience would feel hollow and shallow and make the problem worse, especially if you drink predominantly filthy Australian beer.
As a second point MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, whilst effective immediately, with even casual use has the side-effect of a nasty comedown when it wears off. With continued use you get delayed comedowns that take place a day or two from the high. These exhibit themselves as a rather dark and tearful mood a few days later - commonly known as the Tuesday blues.
There are a couple of points here that I don't like:
Johns' symptoms are as much a result of his self-medication as they are anything else. Given the length of time he's been using it will now be impossible to distinguish between these and the original depression. This doesn't matter however, the treatment will be the same.
Successful intoxication of any kind requires knowledge. Johns should have done his homework before stealing the key to the medicine cabinet.
Self-medication my arse. He did it to get wasted, just like the rest of us do.
This isn't exactly news now is it.
A sportsman exhibiting risk-taking misbeaviour? How unexpected. Amazingly he also has a ready excuse designed to provoke sympathy rather than a backlash, gosh I couldn't have predicted that either. Channel 10 has a rather unfunny sketch comedy called The Wedge in which there is a character called Mark Warey, a generic sports star who is constantly apologising for his bad behaviour. If bad sports star behaviour and subsequent apology and sob-story is such a staple of the social cannon that it appears in a slightly sub-standard comedy show as a weekly event then this can't be considered particularly shocking or revealing no matter who that sportsman is.
In a country about to host one of the world's most significant economic summits where the government is using anti-terror legislation to monitor protestors, where the country's largest city has had the central district fenced off to prevent protestors being able to get within 500 metres of anyone significant, where the federal government has stepped in to Aboriginal communities and effectively rolled back previous native land title legislation for a 5 year period there are much weightier things to talk about that are directly in the public interest.
Being from the UK it seems a little odd to fly for a shade under 5 hours and land in the same country as you started in. If you flew to the same height as we did going from Sydney to Perth you could probably have seen the majority of the British Isles, we couldn't see much other than the southern coast of Australia which you could see the perfect map outline of. This country is so huge that I have trouble properly comprehending it. At one point we flew past what appeared to be 'quite a large town' in the middle of absolutely nothing, it was Adelaide (though to be fair to British eyes the South Australian capital isn't much more than a town).
Perth itself is a peculiar city. The CBD is tiny, comprising a total of about 5 city blocks. From the air it looks even more like a model than cities normally do.
Quokka/Rott
There are a few good things to see around Perth, noteably Freemantle which is a seaside town with a great Sunday market which we didn't go to and Rottnest Island (or Wadjemup in the local Aboriginal dialect). Rottnest means rat's nest in dutch and it was dutch explorers that gave the place its name. Why would you call such an idyllic place a rat's nest? Because of the quokkas. Take a field mouse, cross it with kangaroo and you have a quokka. They seem quite unafraid of people and will happily eat or drink from your hand (not that you should really get them drunk...). They curl up into a ball when threatened, leading to a now eradicated local sport of quokka soccer.
Rottnest is a beautiful place, we rode around the whole island in about 2 hours on hired bicycles stopping to swim at a near perfect beach (it's also quite hilly so the ride wasn't particularly easy on the prostate). Sadly we didn't take enough pictures here and I need to be edited out of the ones we do have so they might be a while in arriving on this post.
Whilst I wait for the coffee to bring me back to life and before I engage on some of my long-planned but never acted on writing projects, one of which is now a sprawling epic of seven paragraphs, a quick update. Unbeleivably I have been doing things and not writing about them.The picture to the left is a shot from a friend's balcony accross central Sydney, in a thunderstorm. We went to her house to play poker, we left at three the next morning. The prize was a hangover and I won it in style.
The hot seat
The Laneway Festival was great fun and I can recommend looking up almost all the acts on the lineup as they each have something different (there are links to YouTube and MySpace on the laneway site if you feel so inclined). A small section of Sydney, just a block back from Circular Quay is shut off and turned into a mini music festival on the streets with two large stages, one dj stage from the back of a pickup and one club venue in The Basement. The sofa in the picture was a doomed seat. At first it seems to be the best placed in the entire venue; not far from the least crowded bar, soft and comfy, close to the relaxed music coming from the dj etc. However it was a warm day, a very warm day. I played tennis that morning and when I finished at ten it was 43 Celsius on court. This seat had the highest turnover of occupants. I was watching and timing, nobody lasted five minutes.
Grow my pretties...
We have begun to grow herbs and the like on our back balcony. We have Chives, Basil, Coriander, Thyme, Parsely and Oregano growing from seed. After considerable success with it in London we also decided to see if we could grow Chillis. You can see the result of scraping out the seeds from a chilli straight from the fridge into the compost and a week of watering and sunshine, we have about 30 seedlings!
When we were given a couple of chilli plants in London we lived in a house that had a terrible mouse problem and the little bastards completely ate our plant right down to the woodiest twig. We had to nurse the small stick that was left back in to leaf and eventually fruiting. It now resides in Hertfordshire and is doing very well I'm told. I will forever be wondering about that mouse. I had mental images of a rocket-propelled rodent that made me giggle like a toddler.
It was this incident that ultimately spelled the end for the mice. The non-aggression pact was rendered null and void and the use of force authorised, if not completely encouraged. One week of peanut-butter baited traps dealt with the incautious and letting our neighbour's cat into the house seemed to have dealt with the rest. I'm not particularly sure how effective a hunter Wonky the boss-eyed moggy would have been but we didn't see many mice after that.
...was fantastic fun and whilst the hangover is still a little in evidence this morning has been one of those mornings that makes you glad to be alive.
I've been sat at Coogee beach watching someone's border collie jumping at the water from the showers. There are the usual hard-core of ocean swimmers ploughing their way accross the bay who won't be out of the water for an hour yet, not even the shark alarm phases them. I've finished a much needed bacon and egg roll and am trying to drink the coffee that my addiction craves but that is simply too hot for such a sunny morning. The bus I wanted home has just left behind me, I've decided to walk anyway.
As I'm scrawling this in my notebook it's 7:30am and the sun is already so powerful that I'm squinting with my sunglasses on. Without exagerating, the light has a unique colour that makes the world appear as if drenched in golden syrup.The pacific, for once living up to its' name, is glittering and the beach squeeking under my bare feet is already warm and unusually deserted.
One of the things you are never told about Australia is the smell. The eucalypts give the country a uniquely distictive odour. In the moments before a rainstorm they have the rank reek of a tomcat's favourite alley, territorially marked. After the downpour they give off a a sinus clearing mentholated perfume that makes you take enourmous lungfulls of crisp morning air. After a big storm the scent can last for days.
A lot of the hard edges to Australia, whilst they remain on many of the people, have come off the country itself. Bushfires still wipe out huge areas of the country and drought threatens the livelihood of everyone inland but as a whole Australia is in a boom time. The greatest resources here being the country itself - more or less a licence to print tourist dollars - and the people. The reason that Australia punches so far above its' weight in so many different ways is because the people here will back themselves to take on anything or anyone and will honestly give it their best shot.
Whilst walking back accross the clifftops, beaches and the rocks, scaring crabs back into their pools, getting indignant looks from skinks and seabirds alike, I realise something that has probably been very clear to everyone else; I'm going to be staying here for a while.
My Country is the poem probably most quoted on Australia day.
It was a very un-australian Christmas Day in Queenscliff where we spent it. It only reached 14 Celsius all day and there was rain and hail. Queenscliff is just south of Melbourne which has a reputation for the least predictable weather outside of New Zealand.
On the drive down we took a quick detour to Canberra to meet the Cheetahs at the nearby zoo. They actually let you in the cage with them. They have one hell of a purr and genuinely appear to like human attention. More pictures when I've dragged them off Em's camera.
We drove back along the coast after a quick stop in Melbourne to watch England lose the ashes and a detour via the Yarra Valley wine region. I like wine. I like drinking it when someone else is driving me between vinyards. Unfortunately this is the most expensive way to do this as you end up buying far too much of it. We were relatively restrained and bought no more than three bottles at each place.
New year was spent at a guesthouse/hotel just North of Wilsons Promentory on Australia's South Eastern corner. The isthmus is a huge national park and a designated wilderness for a large part of that. It is also beautiful, but there are snakes, bad snakes.
The drive up the coast was also stunningly beautiful despite the bushfires. We stopped at a couple of places worthy of note. Raymond Island has a huge Koala population for the size of the place, we counted 19 in an area about half the size of a football pitch. You can get really close to them and remarkeably they were sitting up and paying attention. Koalas don't normally do anything at all.
Montague Island is another national park reserve and a place of great significance to the local aboriginal people. A lighthouse was built on it 125 yrs ago from granite blasted from the Island itself. The boat ride out was fairly interesting, it was not a calm day.
I'm not sure I'm ready for a new year. I wasn't quite finished with 2006 and now it's gone.
Kangaroos occupy a strange place in the Australian psyche. Whilst the creature is their national symbol, thousands of them are culled each year and whilst there is thriving kangaroo leather industry that sells accessories to tourists, the majority of the meat goes into pet food. Aussies it seems are a little squeamish about eating skippy.
To try and and get people to change this ridiculous bit of anthropomorphic idiocy the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia ran a competition to rename the meat last year (and yes skippy did come up). Whilst the change was never intended to be actioned it was a good bit of PR which highlighted the fact that Australia is missing out.
Son, grab a beer & light the barbie
Kangaroo meat, as you can see from the picture at the top, is about the same colour as venison and is very similar in taste. However it is much more tender and much more easily cooked, it is also exceptionally lean there is almost no fat. The meat chars to an almost caramelised outer shell when cooked on a very high heat. In the picture below I've not done much more than sear it on each side on a griddle pan. It is best eaten as rare as you can take it and benefits from about 10 minutes resting time after cooking. It has a slightly gamey flavour that goes beautifully with mushrooms, garlic, thyme and other strong flavours. As befits its' nation of origin it barbeques beautifully!
Roo as it is found on my plate
Australia really needs to get over itself and take another look at Kangaroo. Oz has the world's second highest obesity problem per capita (after guess where). You would have thought that a low fat meat that barbeques better than any other that I've tried would be perfect.
