Anzac Day

Public holidays seem to fall into two classes. There are those that still have important symbolic meanings -- Canada Day and Australia Day are days to celebrate a nation; Christmas is... well, it's complicated, but it's certainly fraught with meaning.

Other holidays are primarily a day off work. Few of us really care about Queen Victoria's birthday, or that striking printers helped found the modern labour movement that we celebrate at the beginning of September.

In Australia, April 25 falls squarely into the former category.

April 25 is Anzac Day, and in Australia it seems to outrank Nov 11 as a day of military commemoration. It marks the beginning of the Battle of Gallipoli campaign, which was launched on April 25, 1915, and which dragged on for months before the British and Empire troops finally withdrew from the peninsula on Turkey's coast in late 1915 and early 1916. It cost tens of thousands of lives -- 28,000 dead and wounded from Australia alone. The campaign killed or injured 336,000 men on both sides, with that many again ravaged by diseases like dysentry and typhoid. It was a typical First World War cockup.

Anzac Day is traditionally marked with one of several services, the first of which is held at dawn. At Gallipoli itself, an estimated 8,000 people gathered this year for the dawn service, most of them waiting all night for the service to begin. It has been described as a pilgrimage and a rite of passage for a young Australian to attend the dawn service in Turkey.

In order to fully embrace our year in Australia, I decided that I would go to one of the dawn services. I left it up to the rest of the family to decide if they wanted to go, and much to my surprise everyone but Ana said they would come, too.

We chose to go to Coolum, since our friend Jackie's son, Josh, was playing in the drum corps at that service. I figured we would be part of a small crowd there -- a few hundred people at most. After all, why would anyone get up at 4 a.m. when they could go to a similar service at 10 a.m.?

It turns out I was quite wrong. We were still nearly a kilometre from the cenotaph when I began to see cars parked at the side of the road. It was 5:00, and as we got closer we could see that both sides of the road were thick with cars, and the parking lots were overflowing. There were cyclists and walkers coming from town, and hundreds of people already standing in the darkness. As we parked and walked to the cenotaph, we figured there were well over a thousand people there; by the time the service started, there were over 2,000, all of us there to mark the 94th anniversary of a battle that took place in a spot I probably couldn't find on a map.

Of course, it wasn't just about Gallipoli, or even about the first world war. In Australian mythology, that battle is now seen as marking the beginning of true nationhood, the first time Australians fought as Australians, and the first time they began to see that their interests were not necessarily the same as British interests. (ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a unit that was created just before Gallipoli began and disbanded shortly after.)

It's also a day to celebrate the work, sacrifices and achievements of all "Diggers", as Australians call their troops. The speaker at the service in Coolum was a veteran of the Vietnam war; in the days leading up to Anzac Day the t.v. stations ran greetings from Diggers stationed in East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other hotspots. It may be partly because of those conflicts that Anzac Day services have actually been growing larger in recent years, as people find new meaning in a ritual that honours a job their friends and relatives are doing. It may also be a matter of renewed nationalism, self-conscious mythologizing, or just plain old post-modern hero-seeking.

The service itself was similar to many Remembrance Day services I've attended -- the minute of silence, the playing of the Last Post, the sometimes dull and long-winded speeches. The high point of the service came right at the beginning. As we stood there under the streetlights, we could hear a bass drum thumping in the distance, telling the marchers it was time to parade to the cenotaph. As it came closer, we could pick up snare drums as well, tapping out a rhythm. Then there was another sound like distant rain, the sound of people clapping. The marchers came closer, and we joined in the clapping -- not applauding the drummers, but the people shuffling along behind them. They were the Diggers, grey old veterans of WWII, retirees who had fought in Vietnam, a smattering of younger men and women my own age, and even a couple of children wearing the medals of a father or an uncle. As they walked by, every person there applauded appreciatively. Nobody had told them to, nobody had said "let's give our Diggers a clap." It was spontaneous, heartfelt and moving, a community coming out in the dark to thank the people who had gone to war.

If they ever offer me a vice-regal job...

I love short pieces in newspapers. Sure there are times when I like to dig into a meaty, 10,000 word feature, but the pieces that are more likely to inspire envy and delight are often small, tight, funny, and sharp.

That's partly because, like all editors, I have spent many, many hours looking for creative little things that I can use to fill those annoying holes that appear when a story is too short or an ad gets pulled. As a result, I enjoy seeing what other editors do, and what good writers can achieve when asked to tell a story in under 200 words.

Movie reviewers almost always do it well (check out Peter Travers at Rolling Stone, who's often at his best when at his briefest). John Heinzl's Stars and Dogs column in the Globe is a series of delightful 65 words summaries of strong or weak stocks. E.B. White was a genius at the short piece -- sure, he's best known as the author of Charlotte's Web and the co-author of Elements of Style, but some of his best writing was found in the squibs he produced for the New Yorker: 150 words, unsigned, and almost always gems.

Then there are the pieces that are entertaining just because of what they are, because they reflect something odd about the community that reads them. Which brings me to the Vice-Regal report in the Brisbane Courier-Mail.

I like the Courier-Mail (and not just because they pay their freelancers very quickly, although that is most appreciated). It's a good, entertaining, well-balanced paper. But every good paper has its quirks, and the C-M's is found at the bottom of the comics page.

The bottom quarter of that page is given over to four features: On This Day, Today's Birthdays, Shipping News, and Vice-Regal. The first two you see everywhere, lists of what happened on this day in 1847, and which actress shares a birthday with which long-dead writer (great fun if you try to picture the birthday party that would be hosted by Immanual Kant, Aaron Spelling and Queen Isabella I, for example.)

The shipping news is less common, for obvious reasons, but it's usually found in most port city papers. But never before have I seen a regular Vice-Regal report.

Every day the paper faithfully reports what the Governor of Queensland did the day before. It's one long paragraph, written very formally, with everyone's title duly spelled out -- the Governor is always "Her Excellency, Ms Penelope Wensley, AO" on first reference and Her Excellency on second. And it's almost always insanely boring.

Today we learned that Her Excellency toured Roma House and Mission Australia, and was briefed on their mission to help the homeless, after which she had tea with the board. Very worthy work, no doubt, and probably somewhat interesting if you only had that sort of briefing and tour occasionally. But poor Ms. Wensley does that every day. On Monday she toured the Springfield City Development Project and was "briefed on education, health and technology aspects of the Springfield Project." Friday she opened the Distribution Centre and Office of the Mt Gravatt Meals on Wheels Service. On Thursday she was at the Brisbane Holiday Inn announcing the Queensland Mother of the Year for 2009, then hosted the annual awards ceremony for the Queensland Guides. If you want more you can see all the details on her web site.

She's often accompanied in her rounds by Mr Stuart McCosker, her husband. In a previous life, he was a vet, which I always thought had to be one of the worst jobs around. After a few weeks of being the Governor's companion, though, I might rethink it: sticking my arm up cow's bums for a living might not look so bad after all.

Meeting the local wildlife on Great Keppel

Amazing how a few weeks can just slip through your fingers between posts. I guess that's a sign that we've been busy.

Easter in Australia is the start of a school holiday -- one week in Queensland, two in New South Wales, not sure about the other states and territories. Sharon returned from Canada a few days before Easter, so we spent the weekend here then took off for the Capricorn Coast.

The Capricorn Coast is unique in Australia, since it's the only landmark in the country that wasn't named by Captain Cook. At least, I don't think it is. It's named because part of it sits at 23.5 degrees south lattitude, meaning the Tropic of Capricorn runs through it. The town of Rockhampton celebrates this with a nice little monument outside their visitor's centre. (Unfortunately, the actual line of lattitude is a few miles south of town, but the idea is a good one.)

We weren't there to see the line, though; we were there to see an island. Specifically we were there to spend three nights on Great Keppel Island. It's a few miles offshore from the town of Yeppoon, which is about 6 1/2 hours drive from here. At least it is if you're not driving through a monsoon. It took us closer to 8 1/2, and we were lucky to get through before they started closing sections of the highway. And yes, poor old Kin Kin got flooded out again.

En route we stopped for dinner with our old friend Therese, who we used to see when we lived in the Ottawa Valley. We haven't seen each other in years, but she and her mum are travelling through Australia so we met up for dinner. It is indeed a funny little world.

Before heading to the island, we visited a terrific network of caves north of Rockhampton, and toured the Aboriginal discovery centre, where we all learned to throw a boomerang. And yes, they really do come back. Getting them to come back where you want them, it seems, is the real trick. We bought two in the gift shop so we could practice. I'm sure the neighbours will be delighted.

Great Keppel Island is part of a group of islands (named by Captain Cook, naturally). Some of the islands are now a National Park, but at one time Great Keppel was Australia's party central -- the marketing slogan in the 80s was Get Wrecked on Keppel!

Last year the biggest resort on the island closed down, taking with it a number of smaller bars and shops. Now there are just a couple of little backpacker places and a pizza shop that's open three days a week. But the biggest attraction remains the beaches and the water, and we enjoyed them immensely. The southern end of the Great Barrier Reef is a few hundred kilometres to the east, but Keppel has some good coral too, and we spent a fun couple of days snorkelling over and around it, admiring the fish and the rays in the clear, warm waters. In the evenings we sat and chatted with Germans, Australians and Brits at the communal kitchen/dining hall, and one night we pulled out guitars and had a session.

The last day was the only downer. As we walked into the water for our last snorkelling session, Charlie shrieked that she had stepped on something. It was a ray, but it swam away without doing anything more than frightening her. We got her calmed down, told her she'd have a good story to tell, and waded back out. Then it was Sharon's turn to shriek: she'd stepped on one too, and this time it had stung her. The pain, she said, was insane -- second only to childbirth, in her estimation, and Sharon has a very high pain threshold. That came from a small sting on the foot, a cut that was less than 2 cm long.

Fortunately we were near the resort, and someone got a ute to take her back. Even more fortunately, there was an acupuncturist staying there who had treated stings before, and he knew exactly what to do. (Hot water, as hot as you can stand it, until the pain plateaus. Then elevate the foot and treat it with ice and antiseptic.)

On the way back we enjoyed the scenery that we had missed in the driving rain. Now we're back home again, looking forward to our next adventure.

Oh, and we've lost one of the boomerangs. If anyone spots one in the surf at Great Keppel, throw it down this way.

A pub with no beer... but lots of water

Turns out the flooding was a bit more dramatic than that last post may have indicated. Apparently water rose so quickly in Kin Kin that people had to jump on the bar. Not for the usual reasons, either, but to avoid getting washed away.

There's more on it here.

Under water? So what.

They're going to have to rename the Sunshine Coast if this keeps up. It's been raining off and on for a couple of weeks now, and going steadily for a couple of days. When it rains here, it doesn't mess around, either. Forget the gentle mist or soft rain. Here it's huge, pelting gobs of water that come pummelling down, as if God's bucket is being thrown at you. The rain here can hurt.

Usually this just lasts for a few minutes, then it stops until the next squall blows through. But occasionally it just goes on and on. Last night one part of Noosa got over 400 mm of rain in four hours. Yes, that's a foot of rain!

Not surprisingly, roads are closed all over the place and some communities are cut off. One of Charlie's classmates went home early yesterday because her parents knew their road was going to flood soon; a school group had to be evacuated from their campground along the Noosa River; people will be calling in to work all over the place because they can't get through the water.

But what makes this so cool is how blase everyone is about it. The community radio station has information about which creeks have crested and which roads are closed, and there are advisories reminding people not to drive through deep water, but nobody seems to be too agitated. Nobody, that is, except the national media, who get all excited about reporting "severe weather in southeast Queensland." Fifi the weather girl on one of the national morning shows (yes, she really is named Fifi) was reporting from Noosa this morning, because it was the weather hotspot. (She had wanted to report from KinKin, but the road was closed. So, as Ana pointed out, KinKin was a no-go for Fifi.)

It's really just like a snowstorm in Canada. Those of us who live in it know that you take precautions when heavy snow is forecast, you make sure you can get home, and you wait it out if need be. Some people are foolish or unlucky enough to get caught in it, but for the most part we know that snowstorms just go with the territory. But watch the national news the next time a big storm hits, and you'd think it's a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Even the regional news shows can go overboard: I'll never forget watching the news with Mum when a hurricane was off the coast of Nova Scotia. The whole 6:00 news hour was devoted to hurricane reporting! It was as if the province had never seen a storm before, and people might not be sure how to deal with it.

Turns out most of them knew just what to do: close the windows, bring in the patio furniture, make sure you've got candles and water, and wait it out.

The best films you've never heard of

Last night, I got a text from our friend Jackie telling me about a film on t.v.. It was called The Castle, and she said it was an Aussie classic, so I should check it out.

It turned out to be absolutely hilarious, a tale of a man who is fighting to keep his house from being bulldozed to make way for an airport expansion. It was sweet without being cloying, telling the story of some really, really dumb people while treating them with love and bemused respect rather than just poking fun at them. It was fantastic, and it's just one of many great Australian films.

Here's a test for you. Name five Australian films. I don't just mean films made in Australia like Happy Feet or Moulin Rouge, or even ones that use Australia as a set like Mission Impossible 2. I mean films that address Australian themes, people and ideas, films that tell you something about the country.

A year ago, I might have said Crocodile Dundee, Japanese Story, and, of course, the overblown Jackman-Kidman blockbuster that lumbered across the screens last year. Since I enjoy quirky late night movies, I would also have said Sirens, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. For bonus points I might have argued for Finding Nemo (with its chorus of "23 Wallaby Way, Sydney"). And I probably would have stopped there.

Ask an Australian the same thing, and not only could they name half a dozen good films, they could probably get them for you: at our local video store I recently rented Romper Stomper, a gritty film starring a young Russell Crowe as a neo-Nazi skinhead in Melbourne; The Castle was shown at 9:30 p.m. on one of the main t.v. channels; we've borrowed a copy of Puberty Blues, a coming-of-age film about young surfers.

I also want to see Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kenny, Galipoli, The Man from Snowy River, Phar Lap, Rabbit-Proof Fence and a host of others, and I suspect I'll have little trouble getting them.

Now name five Canadian films. Ummmm... There's Black Robe. Men with Brooms. Jesus of Montreal. Wayne's World has a joke that only a Canadian will get (a donut shop called Stan Mikita's) -- does that count?

Again, because of my love of late night movies and arthouse cinema, I can add a few others like The Adventures of Faustus Bidgood (a surreal tale of Newfoundland independence), Highway 61 (a road trip from Thunder Bay to New Orleans), Beautiful Dreamers (about Walt Whitman visiting an asylum in London, Ontario), Margaret's Museum (memories of a coal mine disaster, with a cameo by a mummified penis). Not exactly huge hits -- some of them with good reason. I'm not sure how many of those I could find at Rogers Video, but I'd wager it's pretty few. And the last time I saw a Canadian-made movie on prime time t.v. was....?

Of course there are good reasons for this. Canadian filmmakers naturally migrate to Hollywood, or else stay in Canada and work for Hollywood without leaving home. Our stories, you could argue, get told in other ways, or else influence American film-making. (Renfrew of The Royal Mounted, anyone?)

Whatever the reason, though, there are some things Canadians do better than Australians, and some areas where it's the other way around. When it comes to telling their country's stories on film, this one goes to the Aussies.

If everybody had an ocean...

With Sharon still in Canada, it's my job to keep everyone in the house busy and to try and maintain the routine as much as possible. And on Friday afternoons, that routine includes surfing lessons for our two youngest grommets.

It may be possible to spend time in Australia without going surfing, but you really can't ignore it when you're living on the Sunshine Coast. Surfing here is just part of the culture. It's like boating in Muskoka, or swearing at other drivers in Toronto: not everyone does it regularly, but everyone has done it at least once. If I'm going to write a book about our time here, I think surfing is going to have to be a part of it.

Every Friday afternoon, the Coolum Surfing School offers inexpensive group lessons for school kids. Isaiah and Charlie have had a few lessons, and are starting to get quite accomplished. Charlie, being our little water bug, is the most enthusiastic about it; Isaiah is drawing quite nicely on his snowboarding experience.

On Monday, Ana and I decided the time had come for us to get in on the act, so we took a lesson at the main beach in Noosa. And yes, I'll answer the question everyone asks about your first surf lesson: we stood up.

More than that, we had a blast. We were using big 9-foot boards, which are stable and forgiving, and even when we fell off we felt that we were really, really close to getting it right -- close enough that we just had to wade out and try it again. We didn't learn to surf on green waves, we spent more time in the water than on it, and after a couple of hours we were sore and tired. But every now and then we'd catch a wave just about right, get up on our feet for a few seconds, and feel the wave moving beneath us rather than moving over us. It was enough to convince both of us that surfing can be completely addictive. We were, as they say, stoked.

So now we're on the lookout for a board. If anyone's got an old Mal in the garage that they want to sell real cheap, or better yet that they would be willing to lend us for the year...

So far there's only one problem with surfing: I can't get the music out of my head. All week I've been alternating between the Beach Boys and the Ventures. I love them both, but it's starting to drive me crazy. I even feel glad when I get an 80s indie flashback and start hearing long-forgotten bands like punks The Forgotten Rebels (Surfin' on Heroin) or Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra (who defined Canada's take-it or leave-it approach to U.S. culture with the line "I don't like basketball or surfin', but Lord I do love bourbon.")

This afternoon, Isaiah decided to sit out the surf lesson and Ana took the school bus straight home. So I body boarded while Charlie surfed. As the sun got lower and the gold tones became richer, I just knew I had to ditch the board and grab the camera. The shots don't do the light justice, but they give you a bit of an idea of how much fun we were having.

The new normal

It's hard to believe it's only been a week since we got the call, saying that Sharon's dad was declining rapidly. She flew to Toronto last Sunday. On Monday she called to say that Gerd had passed away.

Time really does move at a varying pace. Just a month ago, Gerd and Lorna were here with us, planning the next leg of their journey which would take them to New Zealand. It may as well have been a year ago, the way it feels from here. For Sharon, it may feel like it was yesterday.

Sharon is with Lorna now, and will be there until nearly Easter. Sharon says each hour is a little easier than the one before it, which is the way these things go. The kids and I are doing OK, slowly returning to normal.

Of course, normal is a little different around here. Normal is surfing lessons after school on Friday, and going for a swim between torrential showers. It's banana pancakes topped with custard apple for breakfast (imagine a fruit that looks like an enormous dried apple, but tastes like apple pie filling), and watching Friday night rugby on the telly. But it's also road hockey with a friend (Isaiah has introduced his friends to the joys of mini sticks), grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and going for a bike ride.

Sunday we'll probably go to the main beach in Noosa to watch the finals of the surfing competition. Gerd loved the beach, and enjoyed watching people perform well at any sport. Going to the beach seems like an appropriate thing to do.

We've been Hamished

The people along the boardwalk had a look I've seen before, a mix of disbelief, shock and curiosity. You see it in the crowds that gather wherever a disaster has taken place, as they watch firefighters douse the remains of a gutted building, or railway workers assess ways of righting a derailed train.

There is patience in the air at these gatherings. There isn't much happening, not much to look at. The drama is over, but people will stand for hours waiting to see if anything else occurs. Here and there a cluster of people will talk quietly, sharing a little news and a lot of speculation about what has happened and what will happen next. But most just stand in silence, lost in a reverie as they contemplate the changed landscape.

The people on the boardwalk this morning had that same look about them as they watched the diminishing waves from Cyclone Hamish pound what remained of Coolum Beach.

A cyclone isn't like the storms we are used to in Ontario, which arrive, wreak havoc, then move on. This cyclone spent days travelling slowly down the coast, pushing high tides even higher, whipping the waves into monstrous swells, and ripping leaves and limbs from trees. For three days the waves pounded the shore, hitting harder and higher than usual, each one taking a mouthful of sand from the beach and dragging it out to sea.

By Friday morning, the damage was clear. Walkways that once followed a meandering path from dune to beach now end abruptly two metres above the sand. Beaches which had offered many metres of sunbathing even at high tide were now awash, the high tide waves lapping at the base of the dunes in one spot, spitting up against bare rocks in another. Similar damage has been reported all along the coast. Noosa's main beach, which is notoriously prone to erosion anyway, is reportedly now nothing but bare rock. (I've not been there to see it yet, but reports say it will take two or three months of sand pumping to restore the beach.)

But the bigger concern is not what the water has done, but what is still in the water. A container ship was damaged in the storm in Moreton Bay, losing 620 tons of sodium nitrate overboard and sending somewhere between 30 and 100 tonnes of bunker oil into the ocean from its ruptured fuel tanks. It's now started washing up on beaches all along the southern Sunshine Coast.

This morning at Coolum, we watched as a black smear began to take shape in the waves just south of the surf club. Slowly all we idlers drifted down the shoreline, mesmerized by the inky mess being whipped to a froth by the waves. Oil? It sure looked like it. But as people dipped their hands in the mess, doubts began to surface. It didn't smell oily, nor did it leave a residue on the skin. One man said it could be an odd algal bloom. Another suggested plankton. One of the oldest men in our little cluster, speaking with the authority of one who has lived in the area for years, said the black "coffee rocks" that underlie the beach sand sometimes get pounded to dust by the waves, staining the water. "That could be just rock," he said, "but I've never seen it that black before." Over our heads, a helicopter made its way up and down the shore, presumably seeking the same sort of answers we were.

Even if Coolum has been spared the oil, the same can't be said for beaches further south. Lovely sand islands like Moreton and Bribie have been declared disaster areas; so have many of the beaches in places like Mooloolaba, just to the south of us. Cleanup costs are estimated at $100,000 a day or more. There is talk of charging the skipper of the ship, of fining the owners. The premier says this may be Queensland's worst natural disaster ever -- which is saying quite a bit in a state where two-thirds of the land was recently flooded by another cyclone.

Eventually it will get cleaned up. The beaches will recover (Noosa faster than most, since it is equipped with an elaborate sand pumping system that sucks sand from the mouth of the river and pumps it on to the main beach.) With luck the containers of sodium nitrate will be found and recovered before they, too, leak into the bay.

And there is even some good news in all of this. The cyclone has left us with some terrific surf conditions, just in time for the international surfing festival that starts in Noosa this weekend.

I say! Is that a dinosaur in your tent?

Apologies that I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks. Sometimes life just gets in the way of everything else, including blogging.

We just got back from a fabulous weekend on North Stradbroke Island, which I'm not going to tell you about yet. First I want to tell you about last weekend, when we went camping.

Camping is a part of our lives. Sharon and I both grew up camping with our families, and we honeymooned in a tent. Before we had kids, we did some great back country canoe trips and hiking trips, and in the past few years we've spent at least two or three weeks of every summer camping in the tent trailer. All of which means one thing in Australia: we have a great supply of bear stories.

Australians, you see, are kind of freaked out by bears. It's the one animal guaranteed to come up in every conversation about life in the Canadian wilderness. They view bears the same way we view crocs and sharks -- as mysterious and exotic creatures that can eat you. (The difference is that there have been about six fatal bear attacks in Ontario in the past century. Sydney alone has seen three shark attacks in the last three weeks. None fatal, but still...)

For both bears and sharks, though, the response is similar: you learn to understand the creatures, and you do what you can to minimize the chance that you'll see them. The result is that Sharon and I have only once seen a bear in our campsite. That one sighting is a good story, though, and we've also got a few tales about what you need to do to keep bears from visiting. It makes for good campfire chatter.

So last weekend, Sharon's teaching partner Jackie and her husband Kadek invited us to join them, camping on the shores of Lake Cootharaba, a shallow lake which is only about 20 minutes from our house. Kadek and I took their son Josh and Isaiah out of school on Friday, and went to set up camp. The girls joined us on Friday night. We camped at Eulanda Point, which is a private campground on the shores of the lake. It's really just a big field, but it's cheap and cheerful, and at this time of year it wasn't overly crowded. We pitched our tents beneath a gum tree, swam, and just had a great afternoon. When Jackie arrived that night, she queried our choice of campsite -- it seems gums are known for dropping limbs on careless campers. We had a good excuse (Kadek is Balinese, and apparently they don't have gum trees there any more than they do in Canada), but we insisted we'd looked for dangerous branches before pitching the tent. And in fact we had done both those things, although not necessarily in that order.

That night, Sharon and I got our first camping surprise: you don't need to lock up the food in Australia! In Canada, we are meticulous about cleaning the site of all scraps before bed. If we're in the back country we hang the food pack in a tree to keep it from bears and raccoons; when car camping, everything that even smells edible goes in the car. In Australia, you just put a lid on the food box to keep the possums out, and go to bed. It's fantastic.

Sharon saw a couple of possums that night, because we had overlooked some fruit, but they're so cute and dainty that you really don't mind them pinching a few grapes.

Over the weekend, we watched some of the other wildlife. A kookaburra sat just a couple of metres away from the site, and waited for scraps. We didn't feed it -- they're really big birds, with a wicked looking bill, and we've heard tales of people getting their hands cut by kokaburras that are trying to snatch food from their hands. There was an enormous carpet python in the roots of a nearby fig tree, and kangaroos hopping through the fields. But the freakiest creatures were the goannas. They're big lizards -- monitor lizards, officially -- and the ones at this park are about a metre long. They've got enormous claws, and they're heavy-looking creatures, and when they walk they look just like the models for a cheesy cave-men-vs.-the-dinosaurs movie.

They're apparently harmless, but they also show little fear of humans, and it's impossible to watch one waddle past your chair without wondering what would happen if it decided to climb your leg. So when they decided to investigate our campsite a little closer than we wanted them to, we got more than a little freaked out. One of them even strolled through my tent, although not when I was in it. The Australians insisted that they are quite harmless, but we noticed that they too kept a close eye on the lizards. The only person I really believed was Kadek, who said goannas are considered quite tasty in Bali. Everyone else just seemed to be a little too forced in their calmness.

Still, we had a terrific weekend. So good, in fact, that Kadek and I decided to keep Charlie and their daughter Indie at camp and stay up there for an extra night. Even though we went to the information office on Sunday, where I read about the sightings of bull sharks in Lake Cootharaba... Perhaps goannas and bears aren't so bad after all!

Banjo Patterson also had a few thoughts on the goanna. Enjoy:

JOHNSON’S ANTIDOTE

by Andrew Barton [Banjo] Patterson

Down along the Snakebite River where the overlanders camp,

Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp,

Where the station cook in terror, nearly every time he bakes,

Mixes up among the doughboys half a dozen poisonous snakes.

Where the wily free selector walks in armour-plated pants;

and defies the stings of scorpions and the bites of bulldog ants,

Where the adder and the viper tear each other by the throat ---

There it was that William Johnson sought his snake-bite antidote.

Johnson was a free selector; and his brain went rather queer,

For the constant sight of serpents filled him with a deadly fear,

So he tramped his free selection, morning, noon and night,

Seeking for some great specific that would cure the serpent’s bite,

Till King Billy, of the Mooki, chieftain of the flour-bag head,

Told him, “Spos’n snake bite pfeller, pfeller mostly drop down dead,

Spos’n snake bite old goanna, then you watch a while you see

Old goanna cure himself with eating little pfeller tree.”

“That’s the cure,” said William Johnson, “point me out this plant sublime.”;

But King Billy, feeling lazy, said he’d go another time.

Thus it came to pass that Johnson, having got the tale by rote,

Followed every stray goanna seeking for the antidote.

Loafing once beside the river, while he thought his heart would break,

There he saw a big goanna fighting with a tiger snake.

In and out they wriggled, bit each other, heart and soul,

Till the valiant old goanna swallowed his opponent whole.

Breathless, Johnson sat and watched him, saw him struggle up the bank,

Saw him nibbling at the branches of some bushes, green and rank,

Saw him, happy and contented, lick his lips, as off he crept,

While the bulging of his stomach showed where his opponent slept.

Then a cheer of exultation burst aloud from Johnson’s throat,

“Luck at last,” said he, “I’ve struck it! ‘tis the famous antidote.”

“Here it is, the Grand Elixir, greatest blessing ever known --

Twenty thousand men in India die each year of snakes alone,

Think of all the foreign nations, Negro, Chow and Blackamoor,

Saved from sudden expiration by my wondrous snake-bite cure.

It will bring me fame and fortune! In the happy days to be

Scientific men in thousands, men of mark and note,

Rushing down the Mooki River, after Johnson’s Antidote.

It will cure delirium tremens when the patient’s eyeballs stare

At imaginary spiders, snakes which are not really there.

When he thinks he sees them wriggle, when he thinks he sees them bloat,

It will cure him just to think of Johnson’s Snake-bite Antidote.

Then he rushed to the museum, found a scientific man ---

“Trot me out a deadly serpent, just the deadliest you can.

I intend to let him bite me, all the risk I will endure,

Just to prove the sterling value of my wondrous snake-bite cure.

Even though and adder bit me, back to life I’d float.

Snakes are out of date I tell you, since I’ve found the antidote.”

Said the scientific person, “If you really want to die,

Go ahead – but, if you’re doubtful, let your sheep-dog have a try.

Get a pair of dogs and try it, let the snake give both a nip.

Give your dog the snake-bite mixture, let the other fellow rip.

If he dies and yours survives him then it proves the thing is good.

Will you fetch your dog and try it?” Johnson rather thought he would.

So he went and fetched his canine, hauled him forward by the throat.

“Stump, old man,” says he, “we’ll show them we’ve the genwine antidote.”

Both the dogs were duly loaded with the poison glands contents.

Johnson gave his dog the mixture, then sat down to wait events.

“Mark,” he said, “in twenty minutes Stump’ll be a-rushing round,

While the other wretched creature lies a corpse upon the ground.”

But, alas for William Johnson, ‘ere they watched a half-hour’s spell

Stumpy was as dead as mutton, t’other dog was live and well.

And the Scientific person hurried off with utmost speed,

Tested Johnson’s drug and found it was a deadly poison-weed.

Half a tumbler killed an Emu, half a spoonful killed a Goat ---

All the snakes on earth were harmless to that awful antidote.

Down along the Mooki River, on the overlander’s camp,

Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp,

Wanders, daily, William Johnson, down among those poisonous hordes,

Shooting every stray goanna, calls them “black and yaller frauds”.

And King Billy of the Mooki, cadging for the cast off coat,

Somehow seems to dodge the subject of the snakebite antidote.

Australia Zoo: Crikey indeed!

OK, I admit it. I was fully prepared to be cynical about Australia Zoo. How can you not be, when you can't travel more than about 100 metres in Australia without seeing a billboard or magazine ad with a picture of Steve Irwin or his precocious daughter Bindi? It does get a bit tiresome.
But you can't come to Queensland without going at least once, particularly not when we're living less than an hour's drive away. So on Sunday we went.
And what a great day it turned out to be! The zoo is fantastic, with plenty of opportunities to see animals and even touch them, without making you feel like you're in an artificial environment that is stressing the animals.
Even better was the tour we got of the new animal hospital (part of a media package I arranged, since I was also on assignment for this one). The hospital cares for any injured wildlife, both from the zoo and from the community. We spent about two hours touring it.
One photo shows the kids and a "wildlife carer" with a brush-tail possum she had brought in for treatment of contact dermatitis. The other shows us getting a chance to feel how soft a koala's paws are. We also fed elephants and kangaroos, got to feel a python, and saw just about every kind of Australian land creature you can imagine, from dingos and tasmanian devils to cassowaries and wedge-tailed eagles. And yes, there were plenty of crocs. And no, they don't let you hand-feed them.

Presenting.... the tree frog hunter

Tomorrow we're off to Australia Zoo, home of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. In anticipation may I present Isaiah, our own wildlife expert.

This tree frog was spotted on the wall of our house. Yes, it really is that big. Isaiah caught it gently in the pool net, then we watched it for a while before letting it hop away in peace. A truly beautiful frog, it is so much prettier than those ugly, ugly cane toads.

Left brain thinking

Well, it happened, and sooner than I had expected. Driving on the left feels normal.

How do I know? The other night Sharon and I were watching a movie (Burn After Reading, which is absolutely hilarious), and there was a shot of a car driving down the road. Both of us gave our heads a shake and said "Hey!" Then realized that, no, there wasn't anything wrong with the film. The car was indeed supposed to be driving on the right side of the road since the movie is set in the U.S..

Fortunately, driving on the left has felt normal for a while. Even if I do go around to the wrong side of the car at least once a week.

Afraid of bats? Don't read this post

This morning I was driving across Weyba Creek in south Noosa, and noticed a huge flock of brown birds circling over the water. Then I realized they weren't birds at all but bats. Hundreds of them, circling and swooping. I was on a bridge so I couldn't stop, but naturally I turned around at the next roundabout and navigated my way around to the base of the bridge.
What I saw made my jaw drop. Flying foxes. Thousands of them. The trees on either side of the road were thick with them, and the sound of their chattering was deafening.
A sign at the base of one tree said they were here feeding on blossoms, and would be roosting in the area for a couple of months. Obviously this is an annual event, but it's not one I've ever seen written up in a tourist brochure. I suppose I can understand why; "Noosa, home of the big freaky bats" lacks a certain something as a tourism promotion slogan. Quite an amazing sight, though.
We've seen flying foxes in the area before -- the first time we saw one we were driving at night and one flew across the road about 40 metres in front of us. At first I thought it was a big owl, then it turned and I could see the unmistakeable shape of bat's wings. They really are enormous: black flying foxes, which these ones are, can have a wing span over a metre!
I didn't have the video camera with me, but I'll go back and see if I can get some good video. This is something you really have to see in action to appreciate.

No fires, no floods

I've had a couple of emails in the past few days asking if we're either under water or burned out of our homes. (Apparently some of the news reports in Canada are simply describing the fires "in Australia" or floods "in Queensland".)

The fires are some 1600 kms to the south of us, in Victoria. For those who haven't heard, they've had a terrible heat wave there with temps in the mid-40s. That's dried everything out, making fires all but inevitable. When the fires came, they turned out to be the worst Australia has ever seen -- hundreds of thousands of hectares burned, entire towns wiped out. Right now they're reporting over 700 homes lost and 108 people dead, but that number is expected to rise. Unbelievably, there are now reports that some fires have been deliberately set, and that others are being relit by arsonists.

On the other side of the country, much of Queensland is under water thanks to cyclones that have dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain. Two thirds of the state is flooded, many towns are cut off, farmers have had to simply abandon their livestock, and helicopters and boats are being used to distribute food, fuel and medicine. One spot has received a metre of rain since the beginning of January. Again, the affected areas are far from us -- anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand kms away.

The editorial cartoon in the Sunshine Coast Daily today had a reference to Dorothea McKellar's 1906 poem, I Love a Sunburnt Country. It seems appropriate to share it today.

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded Lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens,
Is running in your veins;
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies -
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains,
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me.

The tragic ring-barked forests
Stark white beneath the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the crimson soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart around us
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown Country
My homing thoughts will fly.

School uniforms

Took me a while, but here's a shot of Isaiah and Charlie as they head off to school. I'll see if I can get a shot of Ana in her uniform, but I may need to pull a bit of paparazzi work to get it.

Behind the Headlines

This post is for the journos. Nothing to do with Australia, really (other than calling journalists "journos"). Just something I wanted to share.
I couldn't sleep the other night, so I watched a bit of 2 a.m. television. I caught a film called Behind The Headlines, starring Lee Tracy and Diana Gibson. Made in 1937, it tells of the love-hate rivalry between two reporters, one who works for a mainstream newspaper, the other who works for the upstart radio station. While Gibson (the print reporter) and all the other scribblers follow their beats, attending press conferences and writing the news, Tracy is scooping them all over the place by putting news on the air as it happens. It's the classic battle of technologies, and should be required viewing for any print journo who is watching circulation decline while blog viewership goes up.
In one scene Gibson gets chewed out by her publisher, who says "every time he scoops you, our circulation goes down." Sounds familiar? Then the publisher laments that he's trying to sell the paper, but "if circulation keeps dropping I'm going to have to pay someone to take this paper off my hands." In another scene, the publisher listens in as Tracy broadcasts live from a fire, then says "I hate to admit it, but that was the most fascinating broadcast I've ever heard."
Gibson's a feisty one, though, and she hits back at Tracy. Hiring thugs to stop him doesn't work, so she attacks his credibility. Twice she grabs his mic during a live broadcast and tells his listeners that he's just making it all up, and that they're not on the scene of the action at all, but are just standing in a studio. Again, sound familiar?
The parallels with our times are quite remarkable. This isn't great movie-making, but at just 58 minutes long, it is a quick and entertaining glimpse at the struggles we poor ink-stained wretches have been waging for over 70 years.
As the movie poster put it, "He made the yellow journals green with envy...the "short-wave" reporter who put the news on the air the moment it happened!"
It doesn't seem to be available on DVD, but if it's ever on late night tv, it's worth staying up to see. Or at least capturing on Tivo or tape.

Blue Bottles

Two things every Canadian knows about Australia: the toilets swirl the other way when they flush, and the country is full of poisonous and venomous creatures. The first is nonsense (I suppose you could say it's a load of crap) since Australian toilets don't swirl at all; the second, though, is quite true. There is an amazing number of dangerous and deadly creatures here.
And no, I'm not just talking about AFL fans on a bender. Anyone who's read Bill Bryson's book, In A Sunburnt Country, knows the stats: all of the world's most venomous snakes, spiders, jellyfish and insects are found in this country. This week a teenager was stung by an irukandji jellyfish off Fraser Island. The kid survived, but people have died from a single sting of this one-inch-wide packet of death. And that's just one of many tiny, deadly creatures that lurk in the woods, waters, deserts and back yards.
Of course, faced with this reality, Australians have two choices: they can either stay inside and lock the doors, or they can take sensible precautions and go ahead and enjoy the outdoors. Naturally most of them do the latter.
The trick for visitors is figuring out what sensible precautions look like. So far we've not seen much in the way of dangerous wildlife, at least not that we know of (there was a massive spider in the pool the other day, and I saw a snake on the beach that was about a metre and a half long, but since we don't know what kind they were, we're not counting them.) What we have seen, though, are bluebottles. These are little jellyfish that are known in other parts of the world as the Portugese man o'war. They give a nasty sting, which is apparently extremely painful although it's not deadly.
You see them on the beaches quite regularly, but they don't seem to keep people out of the water. And that's where it gets tricky for a visitor. You arrive at a beach, it's a hot day and you're ready for a swim. You go to the flags in the sand that mark the lifeguards' positions, and read the board that tells you the day's conditions: Stingers are present, it says. You look on the sand at the high tide mark, and sure enough you can see them every couple of metres, a blueish air sack a bit bigger than a marble or perhaps as big as a golf ball and a long, thin blue tail that can be a couple of metres long.
If we encountered them in Canada, we'd stay out the water. In Australia, though, the beaches are full and nobody seems to worry too much about them. People swim, someone occasionally gets stung, and life goes on.
The other day, though, I saw a sight that was keeping just about every Australian out of the water. After dropping Ana off at school I went for my usual walk from Sunrise Beach to Sunshine Beach. There were thousands upon thousands of bluebottles on the sand. Instead of one or two here and there, there were big clumps of them all along the shore. You couldn't even walk in the shallow water without seeing them swishing all around. It was amazing.
Yet even then, there were a couple of people in the water. I stopped to chat to the lifeguard at Sunshine Beach and asked him about them. "Some people don't worry about them at all," he said, "and other people get really freaked out if there's even one around." His tone implied that the sensible choice is somewhere between those two extremes, and that's certainly where I plan to stay.
For more on the bluebottle, go here: http://www.australianfauna.com/bluebottlejellyfish.php

Aussie language

After just a few weeks here, I've started to realize why Australia produces so many great writers, songwriters and poets: these people just love language!

We went last night to see Marco Gliori, a poet who was performing at the Noosa library. He's in the same tradition as Max Boyce, Attila the Stockbroker, or Pam Ayers -- comedians who perform in verse, rather than serious poets who recite (yes, I know my references are rather dated!). It was great fun, and it felt like taking a bath in a warm tub of linguistic excess.

This is a great country in which to perform in that vein. The language here is exuberant and playful. It`s not just the rich field of slang terms, although that certainly makes listening to morning radio entertaining (yesterday I heard an ad for a meat pie shop that offered a special`for tradies guaranteed to keep ya full from smoko till knock-off`. And I actually knew what they were talking about!). There are plenty of other examples which have been collected in Australian slang dictionaries like this one -- http://www.australiatravelsearch.com.au/trc/slang.html.

But that`s only a part of it. There`s also a rich appreciation for a new turn of phrase or new word. Names are always changed, just for the fun of it. Sharon is Shaz, Andrew is Rew, Isaiah is Izzy. Others are created on the spot. I heard a singer named Ange something-or-other interviewed in a conversation which began `How ya going Panjo`She started laughing and said she`d never heard that one. I tried to picture a Canadian host doing the same thing, making up an abbreviation for someone`s name on the spot, and couldn`t do it. (`Today we`re pleased to welcome Shania Twain to the studio. How ya going Shanny`)

But the most entertaining of all is the bluntness of officialdom. There`s a government-sponsored ad on t.v. these days urging people not to speed. The tag line is `slow down, stupid.`McDonalds recently sponsored a campaign against drunk driving, with the tag line `If you drink and drive, you`re a bloody idiot.` News stories are even better. Some examples from yesterday`s Daily Telegraph: in a story about hooligans on Australia Day, the president of Australia`s version of the legion said they were `bloody dickheads`; the commissioner of corrective services, commenting on a prisoner who hacked his finger off in a protest, said `Took him 20 minutes to saw it off, the idiot`; the education director-general, referring to an ad campaign that got the back-to-school date wrong, called it a `stuff up`. That`s in the first five pages of a fairly respectable paper.

I love it! I`m not sure I`ll ever again be able to write straight Canadian news copy, though.

Australia Day

Monday was the Australian national holiday, a celebration of the day in 1788 when the First Fleet dropped anchor in Sydney Harbour. The fleet consisted of 11 ships and 1400 men, women and children, more than half of them convicts. They'd been travelling for more than 250 days, and managed to land with almost everyone still alive. They actually landed at Botany Bay, to the south, a week earlier but soon realized that it was a really crappy place to build a colony. The trees were so big and hard they had to be blasted out of the ground with gunpowder, the natives were unfriendly, there was little fresh water and the harbour was exposed.
It would be more than two years before another ship would arrive in Australia, bringing supplies from England. (Well, perhaps not exactly supplies: the Lady Juliana actually had a cargo of 226 women, most of them prostitutes, since it was felt the new colony needed to grow. A genuine supply ship arrived a couple of weeks later, followed a few days after that by another fleet of convicts).
To mark all of this, Australians drape themselves in flags and their national colours of green and yellow, and head to the beach.
The alternative this year was to watch South Africa, wearing their national colours of green and yellow, pummel the Australian cricket team in a one day match. Happy Australia Day indeed. As one news web site put it: "So pronounced was Australia's decline from 2-110 when Ponting and Mike Hussey (28) were together that they were ultimately left to take the batting powerplay at a punch drunk 8-189. Gibbs soon rendered the total inadequate as he climbed eagerly into the outswingers of Ben Hilfenhaus (1-49), cracking him disdainfully over mid off and mid on despite the moving ball."
Couldn't have put it better myself... even if I did have a clue what on earth they're talking about.
Anyway, we decided to give the cricket a miss and headed to the sands of Noosa's main beach. The kids joined in a thong-floating event -- nobody was really clear what it was about, other than some sort of world record challenge. The main point seemed to be to get in the water, float about, and shout "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy." All great fun.
By mid-afternoon we were tired and sunburnt, so we headed home for a dinner of barbecued sausages and prawns, and some of the truly excellent Australian beer. We decided to give the fireworks a miss, as it was the first day of school the next day. Summer's over. Time to get to work, kids.