day four

I am not sure that even now, almost a full 24 hours later after getting back, I'm in a fit state to write a thing about anything after that extremely full-on drive from Albury back to Melbourne, which shouldn't have been so hard (it's meant to be only 3 and a half hours) but I think cumulatively all the driving and the slightly temperamental/wonky steering wheel on the car and the driving in pouring rain on a Friday night, did kind of get me down in the end. It's good to know that's how tough I am though. 

Overall, to Perry top marks for being a good companion who only needed 95% of my attention 98% of the time, and to all the nice random people I met along the way who always asked me if I was local and what breed Perry was. I will treasure those rando convos. 

Beagles met in Thurgoona. 

I asked Perry if he wanted to review Belvoir Park Dog Park, Wodonga and he looked at me as if to say 'let's not and say we did'.

And finally - three pictures summing up the zany madness that is Benalla:

I can't tell you how relieved I am to be back. We got our deposit back on the car, too. 

road trip day two (a week ago)

17 May: So I don't know how much driving time/kms we've clocked up yesterday and today, only that it is a lot. We were in Leeton last night and we are near (but not entirely in) Orange tonight. In both cases Perry has been a little freaked out by the unfamiliar surroundings but he eventually adapts. He has been a good traveller, sleeping most of the time. Lucky. 

Coleambally rice apologists

Backs of shops Colleambally. I wanted to photograph their fronts but there is major renovation going on. 

Some bird we saw in Whitton

The famous Griffin water towers. Only one is original. 

For a lot of the journey I listened to a book called Palm Beach, Finland which is a comedy crime thriller by Antti Tuomainen from 2017. For some reason the person reading it has decided that the less sophisticated, criminal types in the book (they are all Finns, ostensibly speaking Finnish) must talk in West Country tones. The characters in the book are constantly looking at each other, it's a nervous tic / punctuation for Tuomainen ('he looked at her. "Well," she said...').

That took forever but once it was over I listened to podcasts for the rest of today's driving. 

road trip (last week)

So this is a week ago but right now when I wrote it...

Perry and I are gearing up to go on a big fat road trip for the next three days - staying in Leeton tonight, Bathurst tomorrow night and um I forget where on Thursday night - probably Albury. I hope I booked that... ha ha. I have been mainly concentrating on the Bathurst-Orange (and Vittoria) leg of the journey and the practicalities of disrupting our week and getting out of the house for three and a half days. 

So this afternoon after finishing my staff meeting I am going to hot foot it to Coburg where Perry will be spending a couple of active hours with his cousin Lenny (Lennie?)* then we will make our way to Leeton first stop Seymour. This is all field work - filming work, photographing places with a view to writing up a conference paper etc. My main concern at this point is how Perry will behave out of his comfort zone and whether it will be possible to give him enough exercise etc when a big part of every day will be driving (he sleeps in the car, so that's great, but I will have to sleep at night...). 

Stay tuned for what happened... 

*Lenni

launceston memoreez

This is a more auspicious occasion than I appreciated until I thought about it one second ago; it really is the last gasp of my travels across the landscape looking at small civic buildings for the project I was first employed on 3½ years ago. The book is being written, the MS due at the end of the year, and indeed this is much less a journey to Launceston to trawl for places and facilities, and much more an archive visit to pick up some images and maybe a few extra good ideas to slap the face of the various chapters I’ve been working on (libraries, kindergartens, community centres – all co-authored with respected colleagues). So, even though I am getting a hire car it’s at least as much a pragmatic response to the reality that Launceston airport is far from Launceston, and that taxis to and from in two days, plus the little bit of journeying I am likely to do this evening to check up on the current status of any of the places I find out about today, will add up to pretty much the same kind of price as the tiny Getz (later: no, it was a less-than-tiny Tiida) I will be driving for brief periods of the day.

I would feel overall better about this whole shebang if the last few days/nights of extreme heat hadn’t been so wearying. It is very hard to get to sleep in a heatwave and it’s also hard to cope with when you know that it’ll probably be over in a few days and back to some normal November weather, so we don’t (for instance) put away the warm clothes just yet, etc. Repulsively last night the iced water I had by the bed had seemingly become higher than body temperature by about 2 am though this can’t be right. Nevertheless it was a little bit like what drinking vomit might be like.

So it’s good to be going to Launceston where it is predicted to be only mid-20s (whereas Melbourne today is going to be, I gather, low 30s). I anticipate a few hours in the Museum archives (local history collection), a few hours in the library archives (er… local history collection), and maybe a couple of hours of field work, then an appropriate sleep in the ‘heritage accommodation’ I have obtained for myself. I am then going to repeat most of the activities of today, tomorrow, mainly because the museum archives are only open to the public for three hours of the day, for some reason.

Other complaints aside from hot weather: my right wrist is very stiff and quite sore, perhaps even a little swollen. I may die of it. Also, this Hudsons coffee is quite watery.

Later: Well I dithered around for quite some time, taking wrong turns and going to the wrong place (i.e. the old museum site when I should have been going to the new, but I had no idea) and trying to circumnavigate all the one way streets, difficult considering for some reason as soon as I arrived in the CBD my orientation went 90 degrees counterclockwise, if you know what I mean. I kept thinking I was travelling east when I was , in fact, travelling north and I still haven’t quite got the hang of it in my mind. I saw the ‘no jobs on a dead island’ banners suspended from what I since discovered is something to do with Gunns and its pulp milling activities, but didn’t realise this was a new thing until I heard about it on the news. Another protest, somewhat obscure:




It is an exceedingly pleasant day in Launie today and I have said it before but I suppose I have to say it once more: I really love Launie, it’s one of those amazing towns where half of it is up an unfeasible hillside and there are far, far, too many (i.e. more than zero) men with big fat bellies and ZZTop beards (you rise to the top in this social strata particularly effectively if you got a bald head too), and as I write additionally a shit of a two-year old pounding around yelling at people. His name seems to be Lyn so I reckon his parents got everything they asked for.

I am still tired but I am going to take the archivist’s advice and travel to Lilydale this afternoon, checking out the memorial hall etc. He said it was only 20 minutes’ drive north, but considering my proclivity for wrong turns I will probably end up taking – ooh – 30 minutes.

Later: I did that, and it worked, so I was pretty happy. It was really worth doing actually. Lilydale seemed like a very pleasant small town. It has an ancient shop, too, which is weird. I was told this and like you I thought, an ancient shop? But well, what can I say. That’s what it is.


I am going to rest now, as I am very tired. This room is an oddity. I suppose it suits me.

Next day: not a bad sleep though I did wake at 3:18 for a brief period. The B&B I was staying in, Windmill Hill Lodge, is to be highly recommended and if you go there you will see my name in the guest book, recommending it as ‘excellent!’. Being a B&B they not only supply B but also B, and the B in this case was a deluxe affair riddled with things they specialise in and manufacture on the premises, various stewed figs and rhubarb and then jams they also make and I was told they make their own bread, though I didn’t sample either of these. I was happy with porridge, some cardamom tea (I’d never tried that before and I liked it) and while I was there a small Burmese (?) came through the window which was obviously a drama for the proprietor as it was a H&S issue I am sure but it was a nice cat and I certainly wasn’t outraged.

This morning I encountered what I have to say was surely the most absurd intersection in Australia – I can’t even conceive of a more ridiculous one – on a highway along the river, where you can only turn right when the cars to your right have finished turning left in front of you, which they clearly never would. This was so ridiculous and unlikely to be resolved within an hour or two I quickly figured I had two options – to reverse (this was doable, there was no-one behind me, everyone else in Launceston obviously knew this was an impossible route) or to make an illegal (I assume) left turn into the road I had wanted to turn right onto, and find some place to do a uey. I did this finally it was a little dodgy.

One thing I always like to do in Launceston is visit the Country Women’s Association of Tasmania shop, however, my sense of direction in Launie is if anything getting worse and I was finding it extremely hard to figure out where this place was. I mean, I had been there many times before but the more I find my way around, the less I remember my original orientation (which as I have already explained is crap anyway). So I called directory assistance (‘You’re looking for Taxis Combined Services Launceston – right?’) and got their number. When I called I could not imagine a more suspicious and belligerent conversant, a woman who was unaware of the term ‘street address’ and actually asked who was calling. I suppose this could have been an opportunity to turn hatred into friendship but instead I just said ‘a customer’ and she said thank you and hung up.

I guess when I come to towns like this (is there a town like this?) I throw my weight around a little and upset the locals with my self-importance. Every response I get from them seems to me to be bizarre and small-town-David-Lynchian, but it’s probably not, or even if it is, it’s only a miniscule per cent of the population I am dealing with.

There is probably also some residual unhappiness about the fact that Launcestrians founded Melbourne and Melbourne doesn’t remember. Hence the bizarre billboard of a man floating on an enormous rubik’s cube in the mist, for whom a Melbournian could not possibly provide a solution. I have to admit, being from Melbourne this ad makes entirely no sense to me whatsoever, and I most definitely would have no answer for this person. Maybe the Launcestonians could tell me why the only AM radio I can pick up in Launceston is a very staticky and fuzzy (Melbourne-broadcast) Radio National and 774 Melbourne. I guess this is one of those things where you don’t have time to figure it out, you don’t know anyone local who can tell you, and you are going back in a few hours anyway so it doesn’t matter, really.

At the airport, about ten minutes (???) from boarding: mocking me as fate so often does, very soon after writing the above I encountered, at the Launceston Library, a man older than me who had never used a photocopier before (that said, unlike every other person who ever used a photocopier for the first time, he got it right first time, even though he was trying a tricky manoeuvre that involved folding part of a page over to get the beginning of an article on the same page as its bulk).

I saw Gunns propaganda in an op shop which was basically a spiel about Gunns’ caring management of forests sandwiched between some bits and bobs about wildlife. Nearby – for free, but I didn’t avail myself – was an 80s book for kids about AIDS and why homosexuals deserve it (but people who caught it via blood transfusions just got in the line of fire). That particular op shop was quite amazing, actually. Now I can’t even remember where it is and that’s good because you’d just go there and clean the sucker out. It was a Mission Shop, which is the brand of a heck of a lot of op shops in Launceston, and they are huge!!! One very much got the idea that in Launceston a lot of old people die and someone has to throw out their stuff, and someone else prices it either chuckling to themselves about how much the mainlanders would pay for this junk, or just prices it, randomly, either way, I know that if I had five hundred dollars and the return fair on the ferry, and five free days and a wish to propagate junk to the wider world, I could drive down there from Melbourne and fill up the stationwagon with the geegaws and chattels of a bygone age there and then for almost nothing and come back to the mainland and supply idiots with rubbish to my profit. I’m sure of it. The material was all pretty much useless and one felt a bit dirty hanging around it a long time. Crockery and canisters and utensils and so on. Pretty extraordinary. Even the AIDS book had camp value I reckon I’d stick a tenner on that. The first word in the index was ‘anal opening’.

On returning, I would like to affirm that I am a solid fan of Launceston, and I find it a most engaging city. There is clearly much to the Launcestacian experience that I have not quite got on top of and I wonder if I ever would, even if I moved there tomorrow. Probably not. It’s one of those huon things – you need to always have been there to understand it (like being a white South African or even perhaps a white Australian) and then, of course, you can’t understand it at all really.

on the road again

Casterton Aug 6

We got to the caravan park so late that I think we are going to get a freebie, the downside being we don’t really get what the $18 gets you, i.e. access to the shower/toilet block, which taunts us from across the small central park space.

Mia is up at 7, a most unusual occurrence, and already filled with the promise of the future: ‘I wonder if we’ll see some good op shops today.’ (NB it is easy to see them, but gaining access to them is another matter)

Last night we wandered the main street at midnight (causing attention from local policeman: ‘It’s a bit late to be out walking’ he said from the comfort of his 90s 4WD; we had already observed him prowling through the sports ground). At the end of the main street there are some amazing lights on the hill in a shape I perceive to be that of a bird. (The next day I realised it was the shape of the town's coat of arms-cum-logo). (Hi to anyone who came across this posting searching for 'coat', 'arms', 'policeman' and 'cum'.) Mia was agitating to go back and get her camera to get a picture of this phenomenon and then suddenly it disappeared – they turn it off at midnight.

Mia’s already joking: ‘Dear diary, day one of my ordeal’. We are going to the Casterton bakery which I know from experience is a fab place. I think it is called Herbert’s, you know, on the Melbourne (or would you rather say Hamilton) side of the town hall.

Eucla Aug 8

We spent the night of the 6th in Walleroo, a town in the northern Yorke Peninsula and in very nice accommodation (yes, we caved after only one night in the campervan and went to a hotel the next night). Then we went briefly through Port Pirie stopping only long enough for me to buy a fabulous jumper with the name ‘Teakle’ sewn into it. Our ambition was to head for Ceduna and we achieved this with some stress.

Ceduna was something of a let down, all told. I sort of imagined that somehow the Sand Pebbles record would all make sense and it would be some kind of retro paradise. But I think I am going to have to go back and listen to that record again, frankly.

On the SA-WA border we were stuck behind a station wagon where four teutonic teenagers in bad clothes (and one of them a really ugly guy to boot, and the other a girl with one of those tattoos above her arse that looked like the top part of a lacy g-string, making me want to get a tattoo across my eyelids saying ‘pull your fucking pants up’) launched into the eating of as much soon-to-be-illicit fruit as they possibly could before they were allowed across the border. Plebs. And as Mia pointed out they had so much stuff packed into the back of their wagon the driver wouldn’t be able to see out the back window.

An hour before that we spent an hour and a half at a lookout point just off the Eyre Highway where Mia painted a picture of the cliffs and I fed a bullant some cheese (it was just hanging out at the base of the rubbish bin, so I plonked this big bit of cheese in front of it; it fondled it and kneaded it a bit, then it turned around and had to wipe cheese off its feelers and then, it being a bit windy generally, it blew a few body lengths along the base of the rubbish bin. I thought perhaps the bit of cheese was too big for it, so while it was away from it I broke it (the cheese, you fool, I'm not a sadist) in half. When I came back a short time later half the cheese was gone and no bullant.) I also enjoyed spending a bit of time putting crumbs and crusts on top of the rubbish bin, which were gone as soon as I turned my back but I wasn’t sure what was taking them, I was hoping it was the sweet little sparrowesque birds that hung around in the carpark there, blending in with the greeny-grey gravel.

Eucla is the first town you come to in WA, 12 ks inside the border. We actually had decided we would stay at Border Village, but we must have both blinked at the same time because we missed it. Anyway Eucla seems alright. We won’t know, because we’ll be off before the sun comes up, heading for Norseman.

In Ceduna we went to two good op shops, I bought pants in each, Mia got a red bag, I bought a jumper in one too. We had breakfast at the Cactus Café which I would recommend when you are next in Ceduna. It has an interesting range of foods including Mexican, bacon and eggs, and focaccia. Also the menu outside advertises ‘FRIED RICE!!’ The night before we went to Billy’s pizza and pasta (the lady in the Ceduna Foreshore Hotel, which had stopped serving dinner just before 9, recommended it because ‘they’ve got all kinds of food there’). I probably had high expectations of Ceduna and shouldn’t have.

What I liked better was Kimba, which is half way across Australia and where we spent a bit of time particularly at the museum. The museum is funded by the community hotel (at least, a plaque in the archives section seems to suggest as such) and comprises a collection of mainly corrugated iron sheds and some weatherboard/wooden buildings which are either reconstitutions or approximations of buildings that used to exist in Kimba.

Kimba was created in 1915 but wheat was first grown there in 1908, so it’s having a centenary of sorts. We were shown a number of intriguing artefacts, including old tractors, stationery engines, harvesters and other machines related to the process of harvest. Additionally, they have two former schools, a general store building and an old settler’s cottage. Restoration of the various implements, etc seem to have been undertaken by school students and/or the elderly gentleman who showed us around. He was at a certain point joined by another man of roughly the same generation who appeared to be almost on the verge of subverting our host’s tour. This was quite funny in a way but also strange (our host did not directly acknowledge this person at all).

At the Kimba 'roadhouse' the woman behind the counter really did have a picture of Kimba the white lion on her, well, breast.

I am not sure why I avoided the charms of SA for so long (five years ago I wouldn't have touched it with yours mate). I am now quite a convert. And of course the Yorke Peninsula is like a homecoming for me, with my German and Cornish ancestry; they’re all Ger-Corns there. But the towns along the Eyre Highway all have their quirks and charm.

Along the way we have been reading of the Motley Crue book which Shane kindly lent us for the journey. So the landscape is somewhat imprinted with the various absurd and awful doings of Mick, Nikki, Vince and Tommy. I wish we would find a Motley Crue cassette somewhere along the way so we could listen to it in the car, although I have always been fairly resistant to their dubious charms aside from ‘Kickstart my heart’. But all I have found is a Prince tape, not that that’s anything to be sneezed at. (Later: we discovered the tape player in the campervan doesn't work anyway, and we had 11 hours of a Robert Drewe novel to listen to and all).

Mia just reminded me there is a ruin in Eucla – the telegraph station. I hope we get to see that; it’ll depend on when the sun comes up and whether we’re still here. (We weren't.)

9 August



This morning at one of the petrol stops a guy and Mia had a discussion about the thing we had just started noticing – drivers waving to each other. ‘It only happens in WA’, Mia said. He agreed. ‘The same people won’t do it once they're in SA,’ he said.

Still reading of The Dirt, I went through every CD in one truck stop collection to find every band mentioned in The Dirt except Motley Crue, who were the ones I wanted to hear (again). Not that I necessarily think I will suddenly love their work after reading their book (in fact, I might hate it more). But it’s INTERESTING.

Later: I have now completely read Judith Lucy’s book about her family which I would highly recommend to you if you like Judith Lucy or just stories about terrible dysfunctional families and the people they churn out. I read most of this while Mia was doing a painting of the red dried-up bed of a lake somewhere about 100 km east of Norseman, where we are now. We are staying in the Railway Hotel, a curious establishment which the proprietor, Ron, has been maintaining in a special way for six years now. It is quite an extraordinary decoesque (but I can’t really put my finger on what I’d call it, architecturally) building; it actually looks more like a hospital than a hotel, though I’m pretty sure it was always a hotel. There is a courtyard with rows of small rooms looking into it and rows of verandahs on three sides looking out. There is something established as an art gallery upstairs (we haven’t been up there) and in the main bar, where we had dinner, they showed the film Speed, always a pleasure.

We are in one of the ‘ensuite rooms’ which has an adjoining wall to the next room so thin I am on very intimate terms with the occupant; though I haven’t met him as such, I have heard him clear his throat on a number of occasions, fart rather wimpishly, bang what sounds like pots and pans and watch what sounds like a television show based on police radio. Mia thought she heard him masturbate too ('at first I thought it was the dripping of a tap, then after checking the tap I realised it was a kind of slapping sound').

10 August

We are now in Merridan, in yet another hotel that has the feel of a murder having taken place the previous week and another due to happen tomorrow. More annoyingly, there is also a feel that the proprietors are saying 'you dickheads, you have no choice'. Today was mainly driving and discovering - no surprises here, surely - that rural WA doesn't get up to even unlock its public toilets on a Sunday morning, much less provide the weary traveller with, for instance, breakfast and coffee. We managed though, and Southern Cross did actually ultimately cater to our requirements - mine was a massive coffee and a salad sandwich cut into quarters in the way hypothetical mother used to do it.

We are 3 hours from Perth but decided not to have a mad rush into town, instead we will go slow tomorrow taking pics and visiting oppies and get there in our own sweet time. And it will probably be sweet, I'm guessing.

15 August - in Perth

Probably the most delightful city you could be in in August. Of course one gets a little cranky with the subtly different elements and you can't use a $20 note in a ticket machine at the station etc etc but why gripe. I spent a very pleasant evening last night reading a 1981 memoir of Dave Warner's early years. Bliss.

I may say more about Perth anon.