Still thinking about Tassie

The problem with having a busy routine and trying to maintain a blog is that you inevitably end up having to choose between doing stuff and writing about it. We’ve been keeping pretty active since returning from Tasmania, so I haven’t had a chance to write about all the fun stuff we did there. I’ll try to get at least some of it down in pixels and bytes before we go off on our next adventure.

On the way to Tasmania, we stopped in Melbourne. We had visited Melbourne back in January... well, sort of. We arrived there after spending more than a week in Sydney, and were feeling pretty citied-out, so even though we’d heard Melbourne was a lovely, vibrant, exciting city, we decided to spend all our time there explring the countryside. We drove the Great Ocean Road, and went to see penguins at Phillip Island, and toured the lovely Dandenong forest and hills. Of Melbourne itself, though, we saw nothing. Needless to say our good friend Jackie, who is from Melbourne, has given us no end of grief about that.

This time, we had a day’s stop-over there on our way to Tasmania (due to the oddities of the airlines, it worked out to be cheaper to fly to Melbourne and stay overnight than it would have been to fly direct to Hobart. Go figure.) Since we hadn’t seen much of the CBD (Central Business District, or downtown), we decided to stay right in the heart of it, booking a room at a “backpackers” hotel near the train station. (Backpackers seem to be a uniquely Australian institution. It’s a term that covers everything from cheap and funky through grotty all the way to downright scary. This one was on the grottier end of the scale, but it was only for one night.) We planned to spend our day and evening in Melbourne just walking and exploring.

It turns out that, as advertised, Melbourne is a lovely, vibrant, exciting city. It’s got some fabulous architecture, tons of great restaurants, and some really cool markets, as well as one of the world’s best public transit systems (which includes free trams in the CBD). We stopped in Federation Square, a former industrial area which is now home to art galleries and museums. In celebration of winter, there was an outdoor art show with the theme of light. The most interesting exhibit was a platform about 20 m square, dotted with dozens of pillars about 2 m tall. Each pillar contained speakers and light panels, which lit and played in response to the movement of people on the platform. In effect it was a giant sculpture and musical instrument which we were all playing. Very neat.

After a bit of walking around, though, we started to get chilled (it was around 6 degrees in the evening). Isaiah and Charlie’s ears were getting cold, so we stopped into a tourist shop to see if we could get them some cheap “beanies” (or touques, as we know them). And that’s where I suddenly understood how crazy Melburnians are for AFL.

This is footy season, so every Friday and Saturday night I get to choose between watching rugby league or Australian rules football on t.v. One of the things that’s intrigued me about Aussie rules (AFL) is that I have no idea where the teams are from. I certainly don’t know all the places in Australia, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of where the big ones are. But when I watch AFL, I see 60,000 people cheering as teams from St. Kilda, Essendon, or Collingwood hammer each other. And I think “surely these must be fairly big places to have this many fans come out to their games week after week. Why have I not heard of them?” In Melbourne, I suddenly realized what was going on. St. Kilda, Essendon, and Collingwood aren’t cities. They’re all parts of Melbourne.

And they’re not suburbs from distant parts of the city – they’re neighbourhoods, butting up against each other. In our walks around Melbourne, we passed through several of these neighbourhoods without even realizing it. You can see how close they are on this map.

In all, Melbourne – a city of 3.8 million people – has nine professional AFL teams. Ten if you count Geelong, which is a small city about 70 kms from downtown Melbourne. Imagine if Toronto had nine professional hockey teams – not just teams from Etobicoke and Scaroborough, but teams based in The Beaches, the Danforth, the distillery district, and so on, with another pro team in Milton. On top of that, I’m told there are another nine semi-pro teams scattered around Melbourne. The pro teams share the city’s stadiums, each of which has four games on a typical weekend. The desk clerk at our hotel said there are about 300,000 Melburnians at a footy match each weekend!

I’ve been told that going to the footy in Melbourne is one of the city’s quintessential experiences. Unfortunately we hadn’t timed our trip to catch a game. But this weekend we’re going to do the next best thing by going to Brisbane to watch the Brisbane Lions take on the North Melbourne Kangaroos. Charlie bought a Kangaroos hat in Melbourne, mainly because he liked the name. He's not sure whether he’ll wear it to the game on Saturday, though, as it only seems right that we cheer for the Brisbane team. (Isaiah bought a Geelong Cats hat, because they won the first game he saw on t.v., and because we stayed in Geelong while exploring the Great Ocean Road. But he thinks he’ll cheer for the Lions as well.)

Most Queenslanders seem to view AFL as a bit of an intruder, here in the rugby league heartland. That would explain why tickets are being sold on a two-for-one promotion this weekend. But it should still be fun to pile into The Gabba and see what all the fuss is about.

Eating well with the nine-year-olds

Every now and then you get to witness a t.v. show that makes the shift from programming to phenomenon. This year that show is a little reality program called Master Chef Australia.

The premise is pretty simple: a few dozen of the country's best amateur cooks compete to see who can impress a team of professional chefs/food critics in a variety of challenges, as their numbers are gradually winnowed down until only one remains. The challenges are all genuinely food-related, such as making a meal from a given set of ingredients, or trying to copy a professional chef's signature dish (usually something horrendously complex). The competitors are quite ordinary -- not the "eye-candy with issues" that are cast on most other reality shows -- and there's a spirit of camaraderie that is refreshing. It sounds rather mundane, and highly derivative, but amazingly it isn't. It's entertaining and fun, and it's the top-rated show in Australia -- with an audience of 2.3 million this week, that means about 10 per cent of the people in the country are watching it.

This is the final week, and everywhere you go you hear people talking about the show, debating whether Chris should have been voted out despite the fact that his braised beef cheeks were judged a failure, or whether Poh was wise to use century eggs in her dumplings. It's particularly popular with families -- we're certainly not the only family that gathers together to watch it every night, nor are we the only parents to see our children suddenly taking a greater interest in plating technique or a desire to learn to make croque em bouche.

Naturally, then, when we started planning a birthday party for Charlie, he decided he wanted it to have a Master Chef theme. Today we had six 9- and 10-year-olds over for an afternoon of cooking and fun. We mimicked a number of elements from the show, which all of the kids watch with just as much fanaticism as Charlie does. For example, every week the professional chefs on the show conduct a "master class" in everything from sausage-making to how to make a proper kofta. We decided to teach the kids how to make their own pizza, starting with making the dough from scratch:


A popular elimination challenge requires contestants to name all the ingredients in a complex dish such as minestrone or Indonesian curry. We had a blindfold tasting where the kids had to identify items as varied as golden syrup and fresh lychees.

We even had a visit from one of the judges, Melbourne Age food critic Matt Preston.

All in all, it was a pretty enjoyable and memorable birthday party.




Tomorrow night is the final episode of the show, and along with a few million Australians we'll be gathered around the t.v. watching to see who wins. And, like a few million Australians, we'll be hoping to reap the benefits of the show in the coming months as our children attempt to cook ever more complex and satisfying dishes.

...in the forests of the night

Like most islands, Tasmania has benefited from its isolation. Give a land a few thousand years of peace and quiet and you’re bound to end up with some creatures that don’t exist anywhere else. That’s as much a result of what doesn’t evolve as what does. Australia as a whole didn’t throw up any large, hoofed ungulates like deer or antelope, so that niche in the ecosystem was filled by enormous jumping mice (kangaroos and wallabies). And until a few thousand years ago, Australia didn’t have many large carnivores either – no lions or wolves – so small scavengers and herbivores were able to live unmolested.
Unfortunately, around 5,000 years ago or so the aborigines who lived in northern Australia met up with some wandering Polynesians who introduced them to this really cool companion animal they’d domesticated, and before long there were dogs – and later their wild cousins, dingos – running all over the country, gobbling up anything that wasn’t fast or fierce or poisonous or camouflaged.
For whatever reason, though, the natives who lived across the Bass Straight didn’t take to dogs. It could be that they just didn’t travel to the mainland much – having 200 kms of the most storm-tossed ocean in the world to cross may have had something to do with it. So the devils and the thylacines survived. At least the devils did. The thylacines – marsupial dog-like creatures also known as the Tasmanian Tiger -- were doing alright too, until Europeans decided they didn’t really like having their sheep eaten and started hunting them. In the late 18th century there was a bounty on thylacines – up to one pound a head, an enormous sum at the time. The last known animal died in a Hobart zoo. There have been hundreds of sightings since then, but nothing confirmed by scientists.
We recently visited the Bonorong Wildlife Park, a rehabilitation and rescue centre just outside Hobart. We hand-fed kangaroos, petted a wombat and an imported koala (another creature that never made it across the Bass Straight), and marvelled at the weird sound produced by devils (it’s a cross between a growl and a shriek – a bit higher pitched than the one on the Bugs Bunny cartoons. If you imagine yourself as a newly arrived settler in Tasmania, huddled in your hut and hearing those noises echoing through the dark, it’s not hard to see why they earned their name). On a wall outside the gift shop is a tribute to the thylacine. I was surprised that it said “some believe the thylacine to be extinct,” so I asked inside. I ended up chatting with Greg Irons, an energetic man in his 20s who runs the rehabilitation centre. I asked him if he thought thylacines still existed. “Ten years ago, I would have said almost certainly,” he said. “Today, probably not.”
More than a decade ago, he said, a hunter he knew and trusted said he had spent a full minute observing a thylacine from about 20 metres away, and had even taken a plaster cast of the print. Irons thinks that may have been one of the last ones left. “We still get people in here who say they’ve seen one, or who claim to know where they breed, but...” and he dismissed their credibility with a shrug.
But why, I wondered, was he so sure they had died out? While driving to the Hastings Caves and Cockle Creek we had seen just how dense the Tasmanian rain forest can be, and that area was just the beginning of a massive wilderness region that stretches for hundreds of kilometres. Surely there could be thousands of thylacines still roaming in the forest undetected? Irons said that’s not the kind of habitat these cats need. “They weren’t fast animals, but they had endurance. Lots of things could outrun them but they would just keep going and going until they caught up.” They were hunters of the open land, he said, and that land is pretty heavily used by farmers and shepherds. If there were still thylacines there, someone would have seen them.
If the thylacine really is gone, though, it certainly still lives on in Tasmanian iconography. From license plates to beer labels, t-shirts to shot glasses, thylacines are everywhere in Tasmania. In downtown Hobart, I walked past the former headquarters of the Cascade Brewery – Australia’s oldest brewery, founded in 1834. Atop the grey stone building was a carving of a beer cask, and perched on that was the unmistakeable striped figure of the thylacine. Since the building was constructed in the 1870s, the sculpture dates from a time when thylacines were still roaming the fields and hedgerows, still being shot on sight and poisoned for a bounty.
And that, it seems to me, is the oddest thing about the way thylacines are used in Tasmania. Yes, it’s a romantic animal with a great name (Tasmanian tiger), but it didn’t just die out by accident. It was wiped out on purpose by the great-grandparents of those who now celebrate it. It would be like coming to North America and seeing monuments to the passenger pigeon everywhere, or finding out that the international mariners federation had adopted the dodo or the great auk as its symbol.
I hope there are still a few thylacines roaming the forest. It could happen – ten years ago, most scientists agreed that mountain lions no longer lived in Ontario; now there’s a broader consensus that they may still exist in the wild.
I also hope someone manages to find a cure for a disease currently sweeping through the wild population of Tasmanian devils. It doesn’t look good, though: in the past ten years the population of wild devils has dropped by 70 per cent. Most people like Irons are focused these days on building “island” populations, keeping a few devils disease-free so they can be reintroduced if a cure for the disease is ever found. They’re also trying to stop new logging roads from being built into areas that are currently disease-free, and even talking about building a devil-proof fence to keep infected animals out of clean parts of the island.
If all that fails, there’s a very real possibility the Tasmanian devil could go the way of the Tasmanian tiger.

Down to the very bottom

Tasmania is a fairly small island -- you can drive across it in a few hours -- but when you have less than two weeks in the place you quickly realize that it's not as small as you first thought it was. When we were planning this trip, we had talked about spending a couple of days driving around the island, going to Cradle Mountain in the northwest and seeing some of the rugged mountain scenery of the west coast. We soon realized there was so much we wanted to see in the Hobart area that we wouldn't have a chance to do that. So we started prioritizing. What were the things we really wanted to see and do in Tasmania? Go shopping in the Salamanca market along the waterfront in Hobart (did that on Saturday); see a Tasmanian devil (today); visit the Cadbury factory (tomorrow); go to Port Arthur (Friday); go as far south as you can go in Australia.
That was Sunday's trip.
When you travel around Australia, you quickly get used to the superlatives being qualified the same way. Every attraction is the biggest, the tallest, the oldest, the only "in the southern hemisphere". In Tasmania, they have another option: "the southernmost X in Australia." Surprisingly it's not used all that often, but it is used for the road to Cockle Creek, the southernmost stretch of road in Australia.
Before Cockle Creek, though, we went to the Hastings Caves. The caves are about an hour and a half south of Hobart, through some lovely mountains and along the Huon Valley. As you go, the road gets narrower and more winding, and the houses seem to get closer to the road. Eventually you feel as though you're driving along someone's driveway. Then you leave the houses behind entirely, and pass along a narrow track through the forest. The last 8 kms to the caves are gravel, and since it has been raining every day for the past two weeks it's pretty slick and rutted.
At the end of it is the Hastings Caves, one of two Dolomite Caves in Australia that are open for public viewing. Unlike limestone, which most caves are made of, dolomite is really great stuff for making stalactites and stalagmites, and the Hastings Caves are just full of them. Thousands of them in a massive cave system. It was quite a stunning sight, and well worth the drive.
By the time we had the tour and went on a trek through the rain forest looking for platipuses (didn't see any), it was getting pretty late in the day. But we knew we couldn't come this far without going to Cockle Creek.
The lady at the information desk said the 28 km road to Cockle Creek was gravel, but in better shape than the road to the caves. For the first 10 kms or so, she was pretty accurate. But soon it too started getting narrower and more rutted, turning into a more typical logging road right down to the trees fallen across the road which we had to skirt around. We took it slowly, though, and after half an hour we reached Cockle Creek. We were here, the very end of the road, the southernmost road in the country.
And what did we see? Nothing, really. No sign saying "welcome to the southernmost point of land in Australia". Not even a view of unbroken ocean stretching as far as Antarctica, because Cockle Creek is on a peninsula and faces north. The actual southernmost tip is a two hour trek through the bush, and since it was getting late in the day we didn't have that option.
Apparently there's a sculpture of a whale at the very end of the road, and a display honouring the settlers who once lived here, but we weren't able to see it. The road was flooded about two kms from the end, and we decided our little Hyundai Elantra just wasn't up to the challenge.
Instead we got out and looked at the ocean, then started backtracking. A few kms up the coast we stopped at Recherche Bay, where you really are looking south. We stopped and walked on the beach, took pictures of ourselves, and contemplated the fact that we were closer to Antarctica than we were to Cairns. And then we piled back in the car for the long, slow drive in the deepening dark back to Hobart.
On the way back, I wondered if it had been worth it. I decided it was. Not because we had seen anything so spectacular, but because I knew I would have regretted it if we hadn't. If we had been 28 kms from the southernmost piece of road in Australia and hadn't gone there, I would have wondered whether we would have seen anything really special. We didn't, but we at least answered the question of what was there.
And, in case you're wondering, we really did go as far south as you can go. The road does a bit of a dogleg just before that wash-out where we turned back, so we would have been heading north if we had pressed on.

Happy Canada Day, welcome to hell

I'm not quite sure whether we were to mark Canada Day on July 1 or 2. We didn't do either, really, but we thought about Canada on both days so perhaps that counts.

On the evening of the 1st, when folks in Bracebridge were just waking up to find paper Canadian flags dotted on their lawns, we were taking a walking tour of the Hobart waterfront. On the morning of the 2nd, when the crowds were just starting to gather for the Canada Day fireworks at Bracebridge Bay, we were arriving at the most brutal of all Australia's penal colonies, Port Arthur, a place that was often described as hell on earth.

Naturally there are Canadian connections to be found all over, if you want to look for them. The governor of Tasmania at one time was John Franklin, who is best known in Canada for his failed attempt to find the northwest passage (our tour guide on the waterfront told me his favourite song of all time was Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers); Port Arthur was named for the same person as Port Arthur, Ontario (now known as Thunder Bay); there's a building called Canadian Cottage on the site, a mail-order prefab building that came from Canada in the early 1900s; following the failed 1839 rebellion, several of Les Patriotes were sent from Canada to serve their sentence in Port Arthur; and on it goes.

Port Arthur, Tasmania, is a fascinating site. If you were a common criminal in England in the early 1800s, you were sent to Botany Bay or Van Diemen's Land (Sydney or Tasmania). If you re-offended, you were sent to Port Arthur. It was a model prison, in many ways, because the focus was on rehabilitation rather than just warehousing and punishing. Unfortunately for the inmates, part of rehabiliation in those days was punishment. Hard labour was just the start of it. If you offended within the prison -- talking back, failing to show up for duty, etc. -- you were given the lash. But by the 1840s they realized lashing was just hardening the convicts, so they came up with another method of breaking a man. They built a place called the Separate Prison, where you were kept in sensory deprivation. No noise was allowed, and you were known by the number of your cell rather than your name. You stayed in your cell 23 hours a day, and were allowed one hour of solitary exercise during which you had to wear a hood. If you violated those rules, you were put in the punishment cell, kept in total darkness with metre-thick walls.

Not surprisingly, the lunatic asylum was located next door.

And forget escaping from this prison. Even though there were no fences around Port Arthur, the woods were thick, the water cold. It's located at the end of a peninsula that's connected to the main part of the island at two points by necks of land that are no more than 200 metres wide. At one of them the British stationed The Dog Line, a line of half-starved dogs that were chained along the width of the land.

The site was home to more than 2000 people at its height -- not just prisoners, but guards and their families, and boys living in a special prison across the bay. There were massive sandstone buildings all around the site, including a church that could seat a thousand. The prison closed in the 1850s, and the site was renamed Carnarvon and sold off for private homes. It was so notorious, though, that tourists started coming almost immediately, and the old lags found they could make a good living by giving guided tours. They also found their tips were better if they made the stories a bit more dramatic than they really had been. Naturally they played up the brutality, showing their scars and telling tales about how sadistic the guards were. Apparently in the world of tourism, some things never change!

Many of the buildings were destroyed in bush fires, but the site has been partly restored. We spent a full day there, and still didn't see it all. Fascinating.

Today we're going to brace the elements of Hobart harbour, going sailing on a tall ship for a three hour tour. Better pull on our woolies!

Way, way down under

The first thing you notice when you fly into Hobart is that Tasmania ain't like the rest of Australia.

For starters, there are the mountains. There are mountains in other parts of Oz, of course, but those we've seen so far are different from these ones. The mountains on the Sunshine Coast are unique peaks -- volcanic plugs that jut up from the flatland with no warning. The Blue Mountains near Sydney are less abrupt, but still jagged and dramatic. The mountains we glimpsed from the plane over Hobart this afternoon are more subtle -- high and substantial, of course, but somehow more serious. The mountains we've seen in NSW and Queensland seem to promise that those who climb them will find more flat country on the other side. These mountains make no such promise. You can just tell that they are just the beginning of a long, long stretch of rolling, challenging land.

When you land in Tasmania, the next thing you notice is the light. It's what I think of as a northern light, coming from low in the sky. It's winter here, and it looks like it. We kept feeling as though we were in Thunder Bay or Scandinavia rather than in Australia, and I'm sure it's the light that was doing it. Even though it got dark at 5:00, it felt familiar, comforting, homey. At 42.5 degrees south, we're on roughly the same lattitude south as Toronto is north. The forests are largely pine, too, with plenty of lakes and rivers to be seen from the plane, so it even looks right.

Of course, Tasmania isn't Canada. Even though we're closer to Antarctica than we are to Perth, and even though it's mid-winter here, it's really not as cold as all the Queenslanders had led us to believe it would be. There are lemon trees growing in the back yard of the house we're staying in, and it was a lovely 16 degrees when we landed -- two degrees warmer than it was when we left Melbourne. We'll be wearing long pants and jackets, but not freezing.

Haven't seen much of Hobart yet, of course, but so far I like what I see. It should be an interesting two weeks.

Long Weekend continued -- rock opera

The Noosa Long Weekend festival wraps up this week, but our part in it has ended already.

On Tuesday night, we went to see Kevin Borich perform. This was, by far, the rockiest part of the arts festival. Borich made his name in the late 60s and early 70s as the leader of a Kiwi band called the La De Da's. He then led a band called the Kevin Borich Express. These days he's a skinny 60-year-old who plays a rockin' blues guitar.

The first half of the show was done with a trio -- bass, drums, and Borich on a steel resonator guitar playing mainly slide blues. Really good, loud and fun. In the second half he was joined by a rhythm guitarist and moved into rock n' roll. Good, really loud, and fun, even though the sound board guys had cranked it to eleven and introduced a bit of unnecessary distortion. Ana and I were supposed to be there to take a turn at the door, checking for stamps as people came and went, but since most of the other volunteers found it too loud in the hall, we ended up just spending two hours there watching the show.

The next night we were supposed to work at a supper club (late night shows held at some of the area's finer restaurants.) Usually you don't get to sit in on these shows, since the tickets are $75 and include a meal, but last night was an exception. As the last tickets were handed in, Jim Berardo, who owns berardo's restaurant where the event was held, came out and invited us to stay for the meal and the show. Unfortunately for Ana, she wasn't feeling well and had decided to stay home, so there were just two of us who got to enjoy roasted peppers stuffed with saffron paela, chicken with chorizo and green olives, and churro with cinammon ice cream.

The meal was great, but the best part was the entertainment: Virgilio Marino and Emily Burke, two soloists from Opera Queensland performed a set of popular opera and musical theatre songs. Powerful voices and -- mainly -- great music, including several pieces each from Rigoletto and West Side Story. It was a shame they had opted to use mics for most of the show, as their voices were so much more effective unmediated, but regardless it was a wonderful evening.

The only downside was that I missed almost all of the second State of Origin game. Yes, I know: choosing opera over footy. What a poofter! My excuse is that I didn't realize the game was on when I agreed to work that show. Perhaps I shall make up for it in game three, by wearing Maroon face paint and watching the game in a pub. Even though Queensland has won the series, apparently they play all three games regardless.

Gone to the ballet

Noosa has a pile of arts festivals, and these days Ana and I are involved in one. We're volunteering at the Noosa Longweekend, which is a two week festival of music, dance and spoken word.

One of the perks of volunteering at these festivals, of course, is that you get to see the shows. This morning we were at a talk by Paul Bailey, the author of Think Of An Elephant. The book claims to be about how science and spirituality meet, using everything from quantum mechanics to buddhism to make your life better, or something -- I haven't read it, but we were asked to be ushers there, so what the heck. It turned out to be something of a bloodfest, as we watched Peter Thompson, one of Australia's best interviewers, rip Paul Bailey apart.

Thompson, who hosts a weekly show on ABC (and looks remarkably like Christopher Plummer) was the moderator of the event. Perhaps things are done differently in Australia, but every book talk I've seen has featured a sympathetic, if not downright sycophantic moderator, who is there to let the author flog his books. Not Peter Thompson, though. He seemed to feel his job was to challenge the guest and push him to defend his claims. Fair enough, except it turned out Mr. Bailey couldn't defend himself all that well. When asked to give a single example of how his theories had made his life better, he hemmed and hawed and finally spoke about how understanding the essential oneness of all beings could help resolve conflict by helping you to see that two people fighting over an orange may not be fighting for the same thing at all (one of them may want the juice, the other may want the rind). Thompson said that was very interesting, but pointed out that Bailey was quoting from Getting To Yes, a classic business management text.

The audience was evenly divided between those who were there to fawn over Bailey's new age musings, and those who were on side with Thompson. Probably the low point for Bailey came when a member of the audience said "I'm a scientist, and I'm sorry but just about everything you've said about science is nonsense. There's no such thing as quantum particles, your understanding of the immune system is completely wrong, and your thinking seems to be extremely wooly."

It made me feel quite sorry for poor Mr. Bailey. Even though he did set himself up for failure by having his sister stand up and sing a karaoke version of A Whole New World, from the Disney movie Alladin. (Apparently it was supposed to make us think about how art and perception and science... well, I'm not quite sure what they do, but I'm sure it was clear to Bailey and his sister.)

None of this has to do with the ballet, of course, except that as volunteers we were given thank-you tickets to go and see another show tonight: the Queensland National Ballet. They performed a piece called Yidaki, and it was absolutely stunning. Sharon and I went, since Ana volunteered to stay home and babysit (opting for money over art -- the philistine!)

Yidaki is one of the aboriginal words for the didgeridoo, and the show featured the playing of David Hudson, a top yidaki player, and classical ballet being used to tell Aboriginal stories. It was gripping -- superb choreography and marvellous dancing. Really a top notch show.

On Tuesday night, Ana and I are going to see a very different kind of entertainment when we tear tickets at a show by Kevin Borich. He's described as a "blues rock guitar legend", but I'm afraid I've never heard of him. Still, from what I can see of him on Youtube, it should be a great show. Wednesday night is the Queensland Opera Young Artists. Art is in the air in Noosa this week.

Long weekends, part one: Bundaberg

It's been a while since I posted, for the simple reason that we've been busy travelling. We've just enjoyed two long weekends in a row -- on Monday, June 8, Australians celebrate the Queen's Birthday, and on Friday, June 12 Sharon's school got the day off to go to the local fair. Every school gets a fair day -- or show day, as they call it here. It was just a coincidence that the Nambour show day falls in the same week as the Queen's birthday.

Since those are the last long weekends this school year, we decided we needed to use them to travel. The Queen's birthday first.

We decided we wanted to see a bit more of the coast to the north of us, so we looked at the map to see what was a reasonable long weekend drive away. Bundaberg looked promising, about 3 1/2 hours north, so we packed up the borrowed camping gear and hit the road.

Bundaberg is on the river, about 14 kms inland from the ocean. We had booked a campsite on the ocean at a place called Bargara Beach, which turned out to be quite a pleasant little spot. The campground itself is a lot like the Encore park we've stayed at in Florida, except that it has a communal kitchen which meant we didn't need to bring a cookstove. Ana was happy, since that meant we had room to squeeze the guitar in the back of the car -- sitting around the campsite, playing Dust In the Wind and Crazy On You seems to be her latest passion when we go camping.

We pitched our tents under some massive fig trees, gnarled old beasts that made us feel like we were camping in a field of Ents. (I seem to keep coming back to Lord of the Rings references as we travel around Australia. Ever since we went to the Blue Mountains and saw -- I kid you not -- Mount Solitary. I can just imagine what will happen when we get to New Zealand in December.) Campfires aren't allowed at most private campgrounds we've found, which makes it a bit of a drag, but we had fun watching the possums prowl around in the moonlight. And listening to Crazy on You, of course.

Bargara is famous for... well nothing, really, other than being near Mon Repos. The beach at Mon Repos was the site of some early aviation testing, but it's best known as the site of the biggest turtle rookery in the hemisphere. Hundreds of leatherbacks and other turtles come ashore here every summer to lay their eggs, which hatch a few months later. It's supposed to be quite a sight. Unfortunately we missed it by a couple of months. But the interpretation centre looked nice. The outside of it, at least -- it was closed for the season. Canadians who were there in January said it was one of the highlights of their trip, so we may just have to go back in November or December.

Oh well, on to Bundaberg itself. Bundy, as it's sometimes called, is in the heart of cane country. You drive through miles and miles of sugar cane fields to get there. Since harvest starts soon, the cane is tall -- about three metres or more. Rural homeowners must lose their scenic view around this time of year, since the cane is above most windows. And forget climbing a hill to get a better view, because there are none. Bundy is flat, flat, flat. There is a hill just outside town with a scenic lookout. The hill is known, with suitable modesty, as The Hummock -- not exactly Mount Solitary.

Still, where there's cane there must be molasses, and where there's molasses you can find rum. Bundaberg Rum is one of Australia's iconic brands, found in every bar and bottle shop in the country. Naturally we had to tour the distillery. C'mon kids, let's go get some rum! It was an interesting tour, especially when we stood at the door of one of the Bond Stores, inhaling the aroma of $6 million worth of rum wafting over us. We got free tastings, naturally, which included a Dark And Stormy (rum and ginger beer), and an aged sipping rum on the rocks (pleasant enough, but not enough to get me away from scotch or Irish whisky). Isaiah won a bumper sticker by being able to remember the name of the yeast they use to ferment the molasses -- because he is under age, though, I had to accept it on his behalf. Like all Bundaberg products it features a polar bear. The bear was apparently added in the 1930s as a way of convincing southerners that they should drink rum, which they viewed as a tropical drink. The idea was that rum could drive away any chill. Apparently it worked, because the bear is everywhere.

Next door to the distillery is a cooperage, where we watched a cooper put together wooden barrels, and tried our hand at assembling one as well. What a lot of steps involved in building a barrel.

We also stopped at a farmer's market. Markets are fabulous all over this part of Australia, because the produce is so fresh and good. We bought a bag of the best macadamia nuts we've had so far, 2 kilos of freshly-picked mandarines, and bags of fresh avocadoes and passion fruit.

And best of all, I got my birthday hat. I'd been looking for one for a while, and I found it in the market. It's made of kangaroo skin, it's lightweight and comfortable, and according to Ana it makes me look like a total tool. Not bad for one hat! It's the stereotypical outback bush hat, which absolutely nobody wears here on the Sunshine Coast. And no, that's not because Coast residents have an aversion to goofy hats. It's because they've got even goofier ones to wear: they prefer enormous straw beasts, a bit like coolie hats. Theey seem to have been put away for the winter, but they will show up again once it gets hot, I have no doubt. And when they do, I'll be ready to stroll out there with my kangaroo hide, looking every bit the Canadian tourist on holiday.

On our way back home, we stopped at Snakes Down Under and got up close and personal with various lizards and reptiles. As roadside zoos go, it was well above average. We also stopped for dessert at a macadamia farm that is, apparently, famous for its ice cream. It was tasty, but a bit bizarre -- more like frozen condensed milk than ice cream. A little of it went a long way!

State of Origin

Spend any time in Australia and you quickly realize that sports here are not simple. In Canada it's easy to pick up on the sporting culture: watch hockey for nine months of the year, and something lesser for the other three months. In Australia, though, there are many more options, each with their own dedicated fans. I remember looking at the sports page of a news web site last year, and puzzling over the icons that ran beside each story, identifying what sport it was referring to. The cricket, soccer, surfing and swimming icons were easy enough to figure out, but why were there several icons featuring an oval ball, each slightly different from each other?

Turns out they could have been referring to Australian rules football, rugby league, rugby ynion, or even gridiron (which is what they call NFL football here. They've never heard of CFL.)

Aussie Rules, or AFL, is often shown on highlights shows in Canada, where it's depicted as the roughest game on the planet, just a free-for-all of high-flying men leaping up each other's backs in search of the ball. In fact, it's a much more elegant game, very fast and open, requiring more athleticism than brute strength. Even without watching the game you can tell AFL players from rugby players, because the AFL players have necks and look as though they can bend their arms.

The biggest rival to AFL is rugby league. Traditionally, I've been told rugby league was more popular in Queensland and NSW, while AFL was played in Victoria, South Australia and southern NSW. That's changed a bit, and both games (or "codes" as they're called) can be found around the country. I'm not sure how rugby union fits into it all -- there's a professional league and amateur teams, but it seems to get much less t.v. coverage.

By the way, if someone refers to "rugby" they usually mean rugby union. Rugby league always gets both words. If they refer to "footy," I think it could mean just about any game, although probably not soccer. Even though soccer clubs here often call themselves football clubs (Isaiah plays for Coolum F.C.) the game is usually called soccer. Confused yet? And I haven't even begun to distinguish between the different levels of pro, semi-pro and amateur play.

I've been watching both AFL and NRL (National Rugby League) games on t.v., and have usually enjoyed AFL more. It's faster, more exciting, more intense than rugby league. League also has a lot of arcane rules and seems to rely an awful lot on referee interpretation -- as Isaiah noted, in hockey you watch the replay to see what happened, in rugby league the referees watch the replay to see whether they should allow a goal or not.

Seeing Australia clobber World Cup champions New Zealand a few weeks ago made for a more interesting league match, but it still seemed to lack something. But someone said I should wait until I saw State of Origin. "That," he said, "is the best rugby league playing in the world."

State of Origin is a three match series played every year. One team is made up of players from New South Wales, the other is made up of Queenslanders. It doesn't matter who they play for during the regular season, because Origin is all about where they come from. And it's a HUGE deal. The sports pages have been full of Origin stories for weeks leading up to Wednesday's game, and on Wednesday the Brisbane papers were all about the Maroons. (The teams are called the NSW Blues, and the Queensland Maroons, a word which apparently rhymes with phones and clones, rather than with Junes and spoons. Don't ask me why.)

Queensland was heavily favoured. They've won for three years in a row, and a large number of their players are on the Australian national team. So on Wednesday night, Isaiah and I sat down to see what all the fuss was about. Eighty minutes later, I was well and truly impressed. I don't think I've ever seen such an intense, exciting game in any sport. It was a thrilling match.

Queensland won, but the Blues put up a good fight. The next match is in two weeks, and I rather hope the Blues win it. That way we get to see a third match.

Time to rug up

It's the first day of winter here on the Sunshine Coast, and we're all pulling out our woolies and putting extra doonas on the beds.

Well, maybe not quite, but we have been wearing long sleeve shirts in the evenings and mornings. Many of the surfers are wearing wet suits (although Charlie and I were still in our rashies when we went out on Saturday.) And I did change my plans for supper: instead of the Thai lamb salad I was considering, there's now a pot of minestrone simmering on the stove.

According to an article in the Sunshine Coast Daily, it's supposed to be a slightly milder than average winter -- lows around 9 degrees, highs of 22-23. That, the paper says, "means it may be cold enough to break out the beanies and Ugg boots" but not the heavy winter coats. Or, in my case, it means I may have to pull on long pants and socks.

It's funny that Australians call June 1 the first day of winter. There really isn't an equivalent marking of the season in Canada. May 24 is the beginning of summer, and Labour Day is the beginning of fall, but winter and spring begin much more vaguely.

Sure, the solstice on Dec 21 is usually noted as the official start of winter (most often in mid-November when we've got two metres of snow on the ground and some smart alec points out that it's only another month until winter begins.) But the real, psychological start of winter is pretty nebulous. It's not even the first snowfall, really, because the snow that falls in October or even early November is usually just an autumn snowfall. Winter begins sometime between deer season and Christmas, when the snow looks like it's going to stay.

For this upcoming winter down here, though, I'm not too worried about the temperatures. As long as we get a bit of sunshine, I'll be happy. Besides, I'm looking forward to a change of seasonal produce: fresh oranges have started to appear in the shops, and apparently strawberries will soon be coming along. Mid-winter strawberry picking? Now that's not too hard to take.

Money for old rope?

Yes, I had to give it a try: I've "monetized my content." In other words, I've got Google ads running on the blog.

It's actually Ana's idea, since she asked if she could put ads on her blog. I said I'd look into it, and got intrigued enough to give it a go myself.

The premise is too good to be true. All I need to do is let Google place ads on my blog, and hope my readers click on them. I'm not allowed to encourage people to click on them, since that would violate the terms of the program. I'm also not allowed to click on them myself, or do a whole bunch of other stuff. In exchange, Google will supposedly send me a cheque (or a check, since they're an American company) whenever my account reaches $100. Which, I suspect, will be every ten or twenty years or so. But still, it sounds like money for old rope, as my mum would say.

Of course, what I'm really giving up is a bit of control over what's on the blog and how it looks. I think I'll have to let it run for a while and see how much that bothers me. Or you. Let me know -- do we even see ads any more, or have we learned to filter them out completely?

Cold weather vacation plans

Winter is arriving on the Sunshine Coast, which so far has meant overnight lows of 12 to 15 degrees and highs in the low 20s. As we seem to be getting used to Queensland living, we're finding it chilly. Apparently it can get down to single digits in July and August, which may mean we have to put on long pants and socks. Shocking!

Fortunately there's a two week winter holiday in July, so we've been considering a trip to the north end of Queensland, where it's hot enough to swim and snorkel year-round. But then we got a very generous offer: someone's mum is coming to visit Queensland during the winter holidays, and has offered to let us stay in her apartment in Hobart.

Now Tasmania is supposed to be quite gorgeous, and it's a part of Australia many tourists don't see because it's somewhat out of the way, so it's a very tempting offer. The downside is that Tassie has real winter -- snow in the mountains, black ice on the roads. Even Hobart, which is a more temperate, coastal city, typically has high temps in the mid-teens at that time of year. Brrrr!

As Sharon and I weighed our options, we decided to see what the kids thought. So I put it to them at supper the other night: go north and snorkel, or go south and sight-see. All three leapt at the chance to experience cold weather again! As Charlie said, you can take the folks out of Canada, but you can't take Canada out of the folks.

We're still looking for cheap flights, but if we can find a deal we may be getting a taste of the cold much sooner than we had expected.

Storm front

Not long after we arrived on the Sunshine Coast, there were states of emergency at the north and south ends of the country. This week, we got our turn. A low pressure system created a massive storm that hit the coast on Tuesday night.
It rained hard all through the night, and continued into the morning. The region to the south of us was the hardest hit, with roads washed out or closed due to flooding. Motorists were stranded on their cars when they tried to drive through deep water. Even the Bruce Highway, which is the main north-south road to Brisbane, was closed in both directions (which is a bit like getting enough snow to close Highway 400).
By mid-morning Wednesday the rain was still falling heavily to the south, but it was tapering off around here. Then I got a call from Sharon: they're evacuating the schools. Go get Ana, she said, then come and pick up the rest of the family!
Apparently this is not something they usually do, but the police had advised school officials that a second big storm was expected later that day. If it hit the area, the flooded creeks and fields would soon overflow and people would be cut off. Better to have the kids at their homes, police reckoned. So thousands of parents drove to the schools to pick up their children and take them home... where they watched the sun shine brightly for the first time in days. It was a gorgeous, hot afternoon, which we spent in the park in Coolum.
Not everyone was so lucky, though. The storm hammered the southern part of the Sunshine Coast as well as Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Some places got 200 mm of rain in a few hours. Others received a third of their usual annual rainfall in 24 hours. It certainly put an end to any lingering worries about drought in the region -- in 48 hours, the water reservoirs received an entire year's water supply, pushing them above 70 per cent capacity for the first time in many years.
The news websites have some pretty dramatic pictures and video of the storm wreckage, and the region has been declared a disaster zone. Around here, though, the most dramatic effect is to be seen on the beach. The surf is the biggest we've seen so far, with three metre waves just pounding on the shore. The surf reports are saying conditions today are amazing, but only for expert surfers. Everyone else, they say, could end up in a bit of bother if they try to ride these waves.
Even so, some people can't resist a good wave. Not long after I took the picture above, at Sunrise Beach, I saw a man going for a swim. And yesterday afternoon Sharon and Isaiah saw two body boarders in the waves at Coolum. It was high tide, and the waves were so big that the beach was completely buried in foam. Sharon said she kept waiting for the boarders to get smashed against the retaining wall, but they seem to have survived it.
I suspect Charlie's surfing lesson will be cancelled today. Even if it isn't, I think we'll say it is.

Gay your life must be (ha ha ha)

Remember the old camp song about the kookaburra who sits in the old gum tree-ee? Remember the second verse: "counting all the monkeys he can see-ee. Stop kookaburra, stop kookaburra, that's not a monkey that's me." (Got that tune well and truly drilled into your head now? Good luck getting rid of it.)

It seems that the monkey-bird reference in the song is no accident. The first time I heard kookaburras, I thought "I didn't know they had monkeys in Australia."

They don't, of course, but the sound of the "laughing jackass" has been used in dozens of jungle movies, and even on rides at Disneyland -- apparently early sound engineers thought they sounded more monkey-like than real monkeys. If you think you've never heard one, have a listen here. If you have ever watched an old Tarzan movie, chances are pretty good you'll recognize the call.

For all their laughing, kookaburras are pretty serious-looking birds. Picture a kingfisher on steroids and you're on the right track. Now imagine one swooping down and seizing the meat out of your sandwich while it's en route to your mouth -- that happened to Sharon a few weeks ago while we were on Great Keppel Island. It makes you jump, for sure. Apparently people have been injured when the birds have come too close to their mouths while performing that little food-snatching trick.

The more I hear kookaburras, though, the more I like them. Particularly when there are two or three of them together, their laughter really is infectious. Rather mad, like a loon's "laughter", but not as mournful. And that inspired me to create The Kookaburra Punch Line Game. It goes like this: whenever you hear a kookaburra laughing, you say the punch line to a joke. "So the grasshopper says 'you have a drink named Steve?'" or "Wrecked him? Damn near killed him." If your timing is good, it sounds like you're the funniest guy in the jungle.

OK, I admit -- the game annoys the heck out of Sharon. But I still think it's pretty funny.

Now I need someone to see if it works in Canada. Camping season is beginning there, and nothing says camping like listening to a loon call on the lake. I need someone to try the game there -- toss out a punch line and see if the loon enjoys it.

Let me know.

Some days you're the dragon slayer...

...and some days you're just one of the dragon's scales.

The ad looked very promising: one of the local papers was looking for a part-time sub-editor. They needed someone who could work part of the time from home, and who could help them bring their print publication online. It seemed like too good of a fit to be true, so I quickly fired off a resume and began follow-up phone calls and emails. When I emailed two weeks ago I was told that the position had been filled.

I was, I must admit, a bit surprised not even to get an interview. I mean, with more than 15 years in community papers and other publications, I have reasonably good credentials for a job like that. Last week I figured out why my resume ended up in the circular file.

There's an old adage that every freelancer has drummed into them: don't pitch a story to a magazine unless you've read the magazine first. It's good advice. You need to know your audience, to understand what your clients are trying to achieve. I know I've gritted my teeth at the time-wasters who pitch me queries for stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the paper or magazine I'm editing. Well, it seems that I fell into that same trap. I hadn't been able to find a copy of the paper I was applying to, but I figured it would be like many community papers. Last week I got a copy of the paper.

At first glance it looked like I had expected, a typical small weekly: 20 page tab, rather poorly designed but no worse than some members of the OCNA. Then I started reading the stories. The front page had just one story: part two of a story on "the great global economic meltdown swindle." The sub-head explained that the global economic crisis is "a swindle, organised and engineered by the international banksters (sic) in order to bring about their plans for a one-world government." Oh my.

Things calmed down a bit inside, with a story on activities at the Noosa Aquatic Centre, some updates on local planning issues, calls to attend various community meetings -- all the usual stuff that fills the pages in small papers the world over. Perhaps the front page was some sort of elaborate inside joke, I thought. Or maybe the printer had been having a go at the publisher. Or maybe the editor had gone insane and laid out the page just prior to quitting in a rage. (It has happened).

Then I got to page 9, with a full page article on the economy of North Dakota, and how the state has managed to remain solvent by doing all its business through its own bank. That's followed by two full pages on how flouridation is evil, and another long column on the way international bankers have created the current financial crisis to bring about world domination (somehow the fast food industry and the pharmaceutical industry are involved too, but I couldn't quite follow it). Scattered in between all of this are articles on a jewelry store celebrating its 20th anniversary, a new sponsor for the King of the Mountain race, and a rally team confirming they'll send two cars to compete in this year's race.

"Who puts this odd publication together?" I wondered. "Who are these people?" On the masthead, where one normally finds a list of the editors, publisher, lead designers, salespeople and so on, I found the name of the "honourary editor," the name of the former editor who has moved on to other things, and a rambling editorial about the paper's goal to bring its readers "news that the major media won't print and don't want you to know about, but which we feel you are ENTITLED to know about" (emphasis theirs). Suddenly I understood why I didn't get an interview. I've spent a good chunk of my career working for "the major media", and almost all of it working for pretty mainstream organizations. In the odd world of this little newspaper, that makes me the enemy. In their eyes I'm not a solution: I'm part of the problem. Hiring me would be like letting an Imperial storm trooper join the Jedi academy.

The job search goes on. But it's not without its lighter moments.

Rainbow Beach

When you spend a year in one place, you start to make mental lists of the things you would do or have if you lived there permanently. If I lived on the Sunshine Coast, I would have a four-wheel drive.

It's not that you need one to get around. But owning a 4x4 allows you to camp in places others can't.

Last weekend we went to one of those places, Inskip Point near the town of Rainbow Beach. Inskip is a state park about two hours drive from here, very close to Fraser Island which is one of the big tourist attractions in the region. When you register to camp at Inskip you have to indicate the usual details -- how many people, how many nights, etc. -- as well as whether you're driving a car or a four wheel drive. That's because only two of the park's four campgrounds are accessible by two wheel drive, and even those are a bit dodgy in parts. The whole place is sand, and those with a four wheel drive can plow through it to camp right on the edge of the beach. More than that, they can drive down the beach at low tide, roaring along as far as Noosa if they wish and enjoying the sand cliffs that give Rainbow Beach its name.

Even with just a two-wheel-drive car, though, Rainbow Beach is a pretty special place. The town itself is rather laid back and funky, a mix of backpacker hotels and a couple of newish resorts, a few surf shops and souvenir stands, and of course a long beach. The real attraction, though, is the cliffs south of town, miles of them that gleam in the sun. The sand is an astonishing range of colours -- reds, golds, yellows, browns, whites, and the views are breathtaking.

Almost by accident we came upon the Carlo Sand Blow, a massive dune that stretches far inland from the ocean. It's so big that Captain Cook commented on it in his log when he sailed up the coast in 1770, naming it for a member of his crew. (I told you Cook named everything in Australia!) It's like walking across a sandy saddle a couple of hundred metres wide, and is the sort of place where you just get mesmerized by the views.

We were also mesmerized by the sight of a film crew at work. About 30 people with three trucks full of equipment, they had apparently been there for four days. A crew member told us they were then heading down to the Gold Coast for another day of filming. At the end of all this, they would have a 15 second beer commercial for Japanese television.

Apart from seeing the star leap down the sand cliffs, the biggest thrill of the weekend was an early morning trip to another village, Tin Can Bay. There's very little there -- a marina and a few shops -- but it's a popular destination thanks to a small family of dolphins. They come in to the marina every morning and swim in to shallow water to be fed. Apparently their grandfather showed up at the marina in the 1950s, injured and unable to hunt. The fishermen took pity on him and fed him until he recovered. He has since taught his family to come in for food too. It's all very low key -- volunteers give a little talk on the dolphins, you pay $2 for a fish, and stand in thigh-deep water to feed them. Great fun, and we didn't even need a four wheel drive to do it!

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.