Having been on vacation for over 135 days we desperately needed to have a holiday from our holiday and booked into a resort at Lakes Entrance on the south east coast of Victoria.
The sheer volume of available space here is just amazing. There’s room enough to swing a cat, perhaps even two, though you might like to wear leather gauntlets if you want to try this. The kitchen alone has more circulation space than our entire caravan, which is so small that I have to go outside if I want to change my mind.
The unit even has a bedroom. Can you imagine that, a whole room just to sleep in? And a bed, big enough for two, maybe even three, though they will need to be very broad-minded individuals.
In the spacious bathroom there’s even a shower recess, yes there is actually a space dedicated to taking a shower. Unlike the bathroom in our caravan that is only a tad larger than your average shoe box and where all forms of ablution can be performed simultaneously, this shower recess is not accessible while sitting on the loo.
Did I mention the bathtub? There’s actually a bathtub! Halleluiah! The day we checked in I took a bath for the first time in months. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m a smelly pig, I have had showers, albeit short ones, but not a real long soak in a bathtub with water so hot it puts a scarlet blush on my cheeks; all of them. Sheer luxury! The hot water system in the caravan, can only produce 9 litres of hot water at a time, unless someone (read: ME) forgets to turn it on, then all hell breaks loose. So if you think those four-minute shower restrictions that were imposed upon us during the drought in Brisbane were bad, you should try showering in nine litres of water. Just so you can picture what nine litres looks like, imagine your average household bucket, the type you’re allowed to use to water your pot plants with. That’s nine litres. For me, a four-minute shower is like a dream.
But best of all, as far as hubby is concerned, there’s a dishwasher in the kitchen. We do have a dishwasher in the caravan too but it’s the manual type and he doubles as the driver. And there’s a washing machine that I don’t need to put coins in, though it also functions as a drier and thus takes up to 4 hours to complete a cycle. It’s also on the small side, more than two pairs of socks and a hanky and it’s overloaded; not that beggars can be choosers, but it has taken me a whole week to complete all the washing we accumulated in the days leading up to our holiday. The machine seems to be running constantly. When they get the electricity bill they’ll suspect we’ve been operating a Chinese laundry from our apartment. I mean, who comes on holidays to do their washing?
The weather, unfortunately, has been less than kind to us. The day before we arrived the mercury hit 36 degrees C in Sale, a friendly country town that is very patriotic; many homes and businesses all have big signs advertising the fact. They all read “For Sale”. The first two days at Lakes Entrance the sun tried to shine for a few hours but the temperature struggled to rise out of the teens and it has yet to succeed.
But tomorrow all this luxury comes to an end when we return to dwell in our caravan and head towards the port of Melbourne to catch a ship that will ferry us, our car and our caravan overseas; to Tasmania.
Our national song is about a thief, our heroes are bushrangers and our best remembered moments in history have been defeats. To say Australians love the underdog is an understatement. But where did it all begin?
In the 1850’s gold was discovered in Victoria. On the gold fields the miners were sentimentally known as diggers because of their propensity to dig themselves into holes; mines, many of whom where Irish rebels. More than 50,000 Irish rebels were exiled to Australia before the end of transportation in 1840 bringing their mistrust of British authority with them. Many of the transported convicts were also agitators, political activists and union organisers. When licences were imposed upon the diggers in Ballarat, the rabble-rousers revolted culminating in the Eureka Stocked that ended when the authorities launched a pre-emptive strike on the 120 diggers who were manning the stockade on Saturday, December 2, 1854. The battle was all over in 15-20 minutes. Five British troops and 22 diggers were killed or later died of their wounds.
Surprisingly, the Chinese, who made up the majority of foreign nationals on the goldfields, were not involved in the Eureka Stockade. It is well known that the Chinese saved all their earnings from their gold diggings and sent most of it home to their families. The English and Irish, of whom most Australians are descendent, spent the lot at the multitude of pubs in town before heading back down the mine to find more.
“When the going gets tough; the tough get drunk.”
Today the battle and the flag that flew over the Eureka Stockade symbolise the birth of the Australian democracy.
If you ask any Australian today who is the most well known Australian most will say Ned Kelly.
Ned Kelly was the first-born son of an Irish Catholic couple in 1855. His father, John ‘Red’ Kelly was an ex-convict, transported for the theft of two pigs. In Australia, Red supplemented his income by horse stealing. After his arrest and gaoling for horse stealing, Red died before finishing his sentence.
At the age of 14, Ned Kelly was arrested for stealing 10 shillings from a Chinese man and reputedly announced that he ‘was going to be a bushranger’. Ned and his Gang of misunderstood poor Irish settlers were declared outlaws after raids on several banks. After more bank robberies, the Kelly Gang had their ‘last stand’ in the small town of Glenrowan, Victoria in 1880, where they took 60 hostages in a hotel. Following his arrest after the infamous Glenrowan shoot-out, Kelly was hanged on 11th November 1880 at Melbourne Gaol. His immortal last words were ‘Such is life’.
Our best know national song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ which was penned by Australia’s favourite poet, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Patterson, is a tale of a bum who stole some landowner’s sheep to have for his dinner. When cornered with the evidence he chose to commit suicide by drowning himself rather than face the music.
“When the going gets tough; the tough cop out.”
In WWI, the Great War, the word ‘mate’ became interchangeable with the word ‘digger’. The Aussie diggers, as our soldiers are still lovingly known, blindly followed British command and found themselves on the beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. The campaign was an heroic but costly failure. Every year on the anniversary of the landing of the first troops at Gallipoli we take the day off to remember all those who died in all the wars, it’s called Anzac Day. Australians also flock to Gallipoli, and in particular Anzac Cove, in their thousands, young and old, on an annual basis to commemorate over 26,000 casualties and the nine Victoria Crosses won by soldiers in Australian units.
But if there is anything Australian love more than the under dog it’s having a bet. It is said that Australians will bet on two flies crawling up a wall. On the first Tuesday of November each year the nation stops to watch a horse race. Yesterday was such a day. In a year of catastrophic stock market falls, rising unemployment and the treat of a recession, Australians waged record amounts on 22 horses running the wrong way around a racetrack. On the same day the Reserve Bank of Australia reduced the interest rate by a massive 75 base points yet this was not enough to knock the Melbourne Cup from the headlines on the news that night.
“When the going gets tough, the tough go to the races.”
And that, folks, in a nutshell, is the Australian psyche.
On October 28, 1841, 213 emigrants from Prussia arrived at Port Misery in South Australia. As impoverished Lutherans fleeing religious persecution from the Prussian King, Frederick William III they were perhaps the first refugees to arrive in South Australia.
Setting sail on 11 July 1841, the Skjold, a 460 tons sailing ship took 98 days to make the journey. Among the original 254 souls on board were Johann Christian Henschke from Kutschlau in the province of Brandenburg, born on 24th December 1803, his wife Appolonia Wilhelmine (née Sparmann) and their three surviving children: nine-month-old Johanne Luise had died on June 29 1841 while they were awaiting departure from Hamburg.
This was no pleasure cruise; there were 41 deaths on the passage, principally among the children. The disease was dysentery. Among those who did not survive to see Australia were Johann’s wife, Appolonia Wilhelmine who died on August 8 1841 and their six-year-old son, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, who died on September 30 1841: they were both buried at sea.
Upon arrival, with his two surviving children (Johann Gottlieb, 10 and Johann August, 8), Johann Christian stayed briefly at Klemzig and Hahndorf, then settled for a time at Lobethal where he married Dorothea Elisabeth Schmidt. In about 1847 they settled at Krondorf village near Bethany in the Barossa Valley, where his house and outbuildings still stand today.
With the help of a son from his second marriage, Paul Gotthard, he planted a small vineyard on a property he had acquired in Keyneton during the early 1860s, probably initially with the intention of making enough wine for consumption by family and relatives. The first vintage in 1868 was about a 300-gallon production. Later, in 1891 Paul purchased land with a small planting of vines near the Gnadenberg Church, which was to become known as the Hill of Grace vineyard. Gnadenberg is German for “Hill of Grace”.
In the mid 1970’s Johann’s great-great grand daughter, Ingid Dallwitz married Richard Glastonbury, an Architect, in the Gnadenberg Church, the church in which Johann’s son, Paul, had been the organist for many years.
Having met Ingrid when we both worked at Office Interiors, I discovered that she and Richard lived only a few blocks from our home in Sherwood. For many years Ingrid and Richard had sojourned in Brisbane, only returning to the family land holding in Krondorf seven years ago.
During our journey around Australia I made a point of looking them up and was honoured when invited to photograph the wedding of their elder daughter, Ilona.
On Sunday 5 October 2008 Johann’s great-great-great grand daughter, Ilona Glastonbury married Craig Butcher in the same church where her parent had wed.
The reception was held at Kabminye, the vineyard, cellar door and restaurant Ingrid and Richard have built and run on the ancestral property in Krondorf settled by Johann Christian all those years ago.
How proud he would be to know that six generations have him to thank for taking that very brave step to leave his motherland to journey half way around the world to start a new life in the far off land of Australia. How lucky is Australia: a richer place because of the likes of Johann Christian Henschke and all the refugees who have made great contributions to our society, then and since.
I just went to the cupboard and found, to my horror, that yet another bottle of gin has evaporated. It’s a shocking fact that while caravanning through the outback gin tends to evaporate at an alarming rate.
When we packed up the house to make our transition to Grey Nomads, as an after thought, I tossed in a half full bottle of gin we had purchased duty free while passing the time of day at Ben Gurion Airport awaiting a return flight to Australia.
It was 1996, the year Australia defeated Sri Lanka 2-0 to win the World Series Cup, a free internet E-mail service called HotMail was launched, Prince Charles and Princess Di signed divorce papers,L isa Marie Presley filed for divorce from Michael Jackson, Jim Carrey was starring in “Cable Guy”, the XXVI Olympic games open in Atlanta, Georgia, George Burns, Ella Fitzgerald, Ginger Rogers, Erma Bombeck and Carl Sagan all shuffled off this mortal coil and I bought a bottle of gin for $15 duty free.
By the time we had reached Burketown a mere 5 weeks after embarking on this epic journey, that original bottle of gin had completely evaporated. Burketown is probably not the optimum place to have to buy grog. Apart from the fact that it is virtually in the middle of nowhere and grog is twice the price as anywhere else, it is also smack bang in the middle of a restricted alcohol zone and thus grog is only available during limited times and in limited quantities. It cost me three times that of the duty free bottle of gin and damn if it hadn’t completely evaporated in just 6 weeks.
I’m going to try keeping this new bottle of gin in the refrigerator to reduce the chances of it evaporating.
Oh…will you look at that, it’s time for another G&T. See you all later….cheers!
We’ve watched the sunrise and sunset over Uluru and, out of courtesy to the original inhabitants, abstaining from climbing it. Further south along the road that divides Australia in half vertically, we came to a town in the middle of nowhere that the black fellows called “white man in a hole”. Because underground the temperatures are a constant 23 deg Celsius year round while outside in summer it soars to over 45 deg on a daily basis the opal miners at Coober Pedy have been digging their dwellings, called “dugouts”, into the rock face since the 1915. The roadside leading into and out of Coober Pedy is a bizarre moon like landscape. Created by the accumulated mounds of earth dug from the pits sucked out by a giant vacuum cleaner mounted on the back of a truck and deposited on the surface in neat conical forms. It resembles rows of tents in an Afghan refugee camp.
Heading south we made a brief stopover at Woomera. As an Army brat growing up in the 1960’s, Woomera was a name I heard mentioned often: a place classmates were either arriving from or departing to as their Army dads were transferred. The Cold War made missile testing the in thing to do and in Australia and Woomera was the in place to do it. A tidy town, though now almost deserted, Woomera still exudes an air of past anticipation.
Until we hit Port Augusta, the way continued to be hot, red and dusty. From Port Augusta, heading south, the landscape transformed dramatically into picture-postcard perfection. We drove past rolling green hills, thick like plush pile carpet with ripening wheat, pastures dotted with sheep, fluffy and white in their winter woolly coats with plump little lambs at foot. At the free camp where we are staying, the beach is only a hop, skip and a jump from our caravan. When the tide is low people walk out and pick up crabs by the bucket load; free for the taking. If you think this sounds like paradise, you’re right, but wait there’s more.
. It states that each bottle is eligible for a 5-cent refund in the State of South Australia.
Knowing that we would sooner or later get to South Australia I had considered saving all those spent bottles. I would have had to sleep sitting up for at least half the journey as the empty bottles would have taken up all my bed space in the caravan but I was convinced my reward would have justified the discomfort. Let’s see approximately 85 bottles at 5 cents each…..WOW, I could have been rich, well at least $4.25 richer.
But some spoilsports calculated that the empty bottles would probably weigh over 5 kg and have increased our fuel consumption by .1%. With Diesel prices of up to $2.30 in some of the more remote areas, that equals $25 in addition fuel for the entire journey. But, gee, when I think of that 5 cent refund it would have all been worth while. Isn’t this really the land of milk and honey, with a 5c refund?
In this neck of the woods, some things are forbidden. Luckily, unlike in many Middle Eastern countries we will not be stoned if caught. So here we hide behind locked doors and shuttered windows and do what people around the world do in Hotels.
I’m talking about drinking alcohol of course…. What were you thinking?
In an endeavour to curb child abuse among the indigenous people of the Northern Territory the government introduced what is known as “the Intervention”. It means that there is a total ban on alcohol consumption in aboriginal communities and limits the time when it is possible to purchase take away alcohol outside these communities. No bottle shops are open before 2pm and it is prohibited to sell wine in casks after 6pm; a very small window of opportunity for the weary traveller.
While we were in Kakadu we consumed our last cask of Merlot and as we were passing through Katherine our stop over there had to be extended till 2pm to replenish our stock. We did a bit of shopping, collected our mail order coffee from the post office and basically twiddled our thumbs for a couple of hours. As the witching hour of 2pm approached we joined the throng of desperadoes standing outside the bottle shop feigning an interest in the adjacent music shop. We stood out in the crowd like the proverbial sore thumb; and not just because of our daggy cargo shorts. The intervention, so as not to appear discriminatory applies to all, even the traveller is not exempt.
So while in the less than picturesque hamlet of Hermannsburg, even though we were the sole occupants of the Caravan Park surrounded by 2.4m high padlocked fence topped with four strands of barbed wire, instead of eating our dinner al fresco we sit in our caravan and drink a glass of red wine on the sly.
This blog has nothing to do with the up coming US elections and all to do with the great Aussie preoccupation of communing with nature.
To “go bush” is the Aussie colloquialism for heading into the wilderness. In the rural areas of Australia, known as the outback, the typical Aussie bloke (male) prefers to commune with nature on a recreation level. This usually entails a late night tryst into the bush on the back of a mate’s ute (pick-up truck), a spot light or two and some rifles and results in numerous dead kangaroos and/or wild boar. At one Caravan Park we stayed at in outback Queensland, the owner proudly introduced us to his pet Joey (baby kangaroo). When I innocently asked if he had saved it when its mother had become a road-kill statistic he blithely answered,
“Na, I shot its mum and kept the baby for the kids to play with”
“How humane of you!” I wanted to reply, but felt my sarcasm may be interpreted as a compliment by this Neanderthal.
Since embarking on our epic journey around this little Island of ours we have endeavoured, when ever possible, to free camp in the bush. It is a more cost effective way to see the country side and entails camping off the main road and hoping we are not trespassing on land belonging to any irate farmers with spot lights on their utes.
Around mid afternoon we start looking for likely tracks leading off the highway. Preferably far enough away so as not to be shaken out of our beds when road trains pass in the wee hours. A road train is a semi towing up to 4 trailers behind it, containing fuel or cattle or other paraphernalia, and is usually longer than the average Olympic sized swimming pool and frequently travels at speeds of up to 130km per hour.
Recently we discovered the delights of the ‘Telstra Hilton’. Not just 5 star accommodation but 5 million stars. Our nation’s communications supplier has conveniently located their radio repeater towers just off the main highways. They provide well maintained gravel roads, big enough for a truck, or in our case, a caravan to turn around in and a jolly big directional finder, every 40 or so kilometres, sticking up hundreds of feet into the sky for us to locate them by. They make great free camps provided they are not located on some farmer’s property and separated from the highway by a gate. The only down side is that radio signal travels best in a straight line of sight and thus the towers are on top of hills and thus tend to be a tad windy. The last one we stayed at was so windy it almost blew us away. We had to roll up the awning on the side of the caravan so as not to do a Mary Poppins across the valley below.
When we look for a suitable bush-camp there are other prerequisites which include a bit of shade, a suitable clearance to light a campfire and some private areas for when nature calls. As these free campsites do not usually come with handy conveniences each tree can be considered as a lav-a-tree for all you blokes, but we ladies need to lower our nether regions closer to mother earth and in some regions of outback Australia, spinifex grass abounds. Spinifex is an attractive spiky plant that, like coral, grows on the skeletal remains of its previous generations. The needle-sharp spikes are to be given wide birth, and herein lies the moral of this tale.
“Ladies, if nature calls when going bush; beware the Spinifex, or more to the point, (excuse the pun); be where it ain’t.”
Whilst shopping around for a caravan, one of the things that attracted us to this one above all others was the voluminous kitchen storage. Of course voluminous is comparative. There was voluminous storage in comparison to all the other caravans that were on our short list. However when we packed up our kitchen and tried to fit 8 cubic meters into 2 cubic meters things went seriously pear shaped.
In an endeavour to bring with us more of the things we thought were absolutely essential, we emptied half-used bottles of just about everything into smaller plastic bottles. In my eternal wisdom, I thought I’d remember exactly what was in each identical plastic bottle and in a moment of complete naivety the idea of actually labelling each one flew out the window together with all common sense.
Two months down the track and the having shuffled endless bottles from one spot to another in a futile attempt to fit in one more thing and to ensure that everything always stands upright, my memory is showing distinct signs of early onset Alzheimers.
In an unlabelled bottle you would be surprised to hear how much butterscotch schnapps resembles cooking oil. While butterscotch schnapps is great combined with Baileys Irish Cream in a cocktail which draws its name from a particular act between two consenting cowboys, it does not make the chips very crispy when used instead of cooking oil. On the other hand, after eating half a dozen, no one seems to gives a damn.
Up here, the road less travelled is heavily corrugated and covered in red dust. Our only companions are a couple of emus, a few kangaroos, a solitary dingo and millions of flies.
After departing Karumba we left the sealed roads behind us and headed through Normanton to Burketown, a route that took us two days to navigate only 220km. The whole way we travelled with clenched jaws to prevent the filings in our teeth from popping out and as we did we could feel the grit from the road which was bone jarring corrugated. We camped alone for the first time since departing Brisbane. As there were no gazetted campsites between the two towns we simply pulled off by a billabong and were kept company by only a herd of floppy eared Brahma cattle and their sweet faced calves and about a billion flies.
From Burketown we diverted from our planned route to venture into Boodjamulla the national park formerly known as Lawn Hill.
We canoed the gorge and hiked the cliffs. It is a place that surpasses even Carnarvon Gorge, so great is its natural beauty.
After three nights at Lawn Hill we braved the more rugged road to Kingfisher Camp. The route here was even more arduous than the trip to Burketown with dips filled with bull dust the texture of talcum powder and corrugations that shook us to the bone. Creeks filled with water, the abode of crocodiles, that had to be traversed on foot first to ensure it was not too deep for the car and van and as the designated sacrificial lamb I was the one who had to walk it. The current was fast and the waters chilly but the toughest bit was walking over the stony ford in bare feet. I carried a hiking pole as my only means of defence against any hungry crocodiles, but I encountered none, only a zillion flies.
100km of the 140km to Kingfisher, was through a corner of the Lawn Hill Station a piddling 11,000sq.km cattle ranch. The trip took over 5 hours not only because of the rugged terrain but also because every few kilometres we had to stop while the sacrificial lamb also functioned as designated gate opener and closer. There were more than 15 gates along the way and the code of the country is “leave the gates as you find them”.
While in Kingfisher Camp we celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary by hiring a tinny with outboard motor and spending the morning bird watching and crocodile spotting. After two nights in Kingfisher Camp we pushed onwards toward Hells Gate, which indeed was closed and from there on to the border of the Northern Territory.
By the time we reached Borroloola we hade covered over 1,000km of unsealed, red dust roads, forded more than 8 waterways and swatted more flies than most people have probably seen in their lifetime.
As fate would have it, we arrived in Borroloola on their annual show day. Anyone who has ever been to the Royal Easter Show in Sydney or the EKKA in Brisbane should try imagining .01% of that and then halve it again. There was one dusty oval with some cowboys riding bucking bulls, one stall selling Dagwood Dogs and one tent with Dodgem Cars, no ferrous wheel, no fairy floss, but a gazillion flies. TOO MANY BLOODY FLIES…ENOUGH WITH THE FLIES ALREADY!
I have it on good authority that they’ve shut Hell’s Gate.
This piece of astonishing news came to us by way of the local tourist information office. After some small talk, one of the volunteers we were chatting with hit us with this bombshell.
“You know Hell’s Gate’s closed, don’t you?” the cheery volunteer inquired.
She seemed surprised that this was news to us when I added, “Since when?”
“Oh, a couple of years now.” She adds nonchalantly
Two years ago I was in a serious accident. T-boned by a car whilst riding my motor scooter, I suffered several broken bones and regained consciousness lying prostrate on the road. Perhaps that was when the gates were closed and for this reason I bounced back from the other side, no room at the inn.
I spent several weeks in hospital, maybe it was on the news then and that’s why I didn’t hear about it at the time. Or maybe world leaders have conspired to keep this hush-hush to minimise the pandemonium that may eventuate if the general public gets wind of it and anarchy breaks out.
I made a mental note to check the CNN and BBC web sites and ‘Google’ it next time I have Internet reception.
“Permanently closed?” I continue with my inquiry.
“Just till they can find a new manager.”
I guess even there it’s hard to get good help these days.
“Is that likely to happen any time soon” I wondered out loud.
“Not likely, no one wants to live there. It’s hot as…as…”
“Hell? ” I offer
“Well, yes, you could say that.” She agrees.
“Where would someone advertise such a job?”
“The local rag usually has such ads,” she advised me, “It’s not far from here.”
What kind of town is this, I wondered, that they have such direct dealings with the dark side and are so free to admit it?
“So do a lot of locals go there?” I ask, eager to learn their dark secrets.
“Sure, they pass through there all the time”. She admits.
“But none have stayed?” I marvelled.
“You really wouldn’t want to stay,” she continues, “you’ll see when you get there.”
“How do you know I’ll end up there?” I ask astonished that she presumes to know me that well after having only exchanged few sentences. Did she possess extra sensory perception?
“It is on the route you are taking from Doomadgee to Borroloola. Make sure you fill up with fuel at Doomadgee. Since they closed the roadhouse at Hell’s Gate there isn’t any fuel available there any more.”
“The roadhouse at Hell’s Gate is closed then?” I reiterate.
She looks at me as though I’m one sandwich short of a picnic.
“Bloody tourists!” I could almost hear her mutter as the door slammed shut behind us, keeping out the flies and the midday heat.
Sinners, repent ye no less.
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