gillard: a post from fifteen years ago

I have to say that every time there is a piece of Gillard news I get depressed. I turn it off if I can. I think a lot of the reasons she is unpopular are entirely unfair. Some of them are warranted. But I really, really want hers to be a regime I can feel comfortable with. It's been a year now and no real sign of that on the horizon. Abbott is apparently hovering in the wings ready for the Howard Years remake. Fuck it!

wisdom of the ages

 

boundary road

These are technically North Melbourne homes by which I mean they are right at the edge of NM in a part of NM that people probably don't think of as NM at all, but that's not the point. What interests me is what is it like living in a house on a very main road, where your main interest is surely protecting yourself from the sound (and pollution) of the traffic right outside your front door. I looked at these on google earth and I now realise that they do have some kind of rear access too, but no car parking space as far as I can tell unless that's incorporated into the main structure of the houses, which it might well be. I will have to wander down there sometime soon for a look. 

 

bulli/coledale/thirroul/austinmer/port kembla a week ago - 3 the bats

 The Bats

bulli/coledale/thirroul/austinmer/port kembla a week ago -2

 

These things had some kind of function in World War 2 (although I suppose they didn't, unless it was preventative) keeping tanks off the beaches. They've been relocated to this lookout so you can have your band photo taken there. 

Ok so that was great, probably 2 degrees too warm for me but everything's too warm for me. Now zoom a few (3?) hours forward to Coledale and we are doing soundcheck for this show. I wander down to the Coledale beach just as the sun is going down (which it does early in this part of the world). 

I wandered up the hill as well - Coledale goes back into the escarpment 2-3 blocks. A train was coming in.

Here's Alec tuning up (I suppose) before we play. We went really well, I think (perhaps not quite as good as rehearsal, but whatever!!!). 

I'll put some Bats pictures up in a little while, for what that's worth. They really had the place jumping. 

bulli/coledale/thirroul/austinmer/port kembla a week ago

So I spent most of the weekend in those places listed above, would rather post pictures than relay the various gossip items as enjoyable as I found them, suffice it to say, it was exactly the kind of thing I needed. It is nice to be reminded I have good friends and even the capacity to make new ones, and it all worked really well tbh. 

These horses were hanging out somewhere and we all turned up to rehearse. So, the plan was that Loaded and True got offered a support slot with The Bats at the Coledale RSL and they asked me if I would play with them, I'm not sure why but I said OK. This was the one rehearsal we had (after Alec sent around a big 30-minute MP3 of the songs). 

The songs are really good, it was a pleasure to play on them. 

We didn't rehearse long, then I went to Amanda and Greg's place where I was staying and that evening we saw Dave Graney and Clare Moore at the Heritage Hotel. Two sets. The new DG&CM album is called Laburnum of the Mind and it's really good. 

A&G have two really nice and skittish small cats, this is the less scared of them (though when I got up on Monday morning at 4:30 the cats really loved me). 

Austinmer cockatoos, they're obviously a horrendous nuisance except I just love those scallywags. 

On Sunday we took a trip to Port Kembla to have lunch basically and see the great bizarre jumble of things they have there.

Guess what these Five Islands are called. I don't mean individually, I mean collectively. 

We walked out on this, I'll make that a separate post, sometimes if posts are too big and exciting, they buckle. 

sydney a week ago, photo dump pt 1

 

Apple maps told me this restaurant (above) was the closest vegan restaurant to the SLNSW.