Category Archives: Australia:March

Tasmania II

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Long time no post………      Lots of blank space where blog posts should be. 

Apologies if you were hanging on in eager anticipation of another post, and major apologies (and awed congratulations) if you have been holding your breath, but I have simply been woefully tardy – so, in order to catch up with where we are now, I’ll add some catch-up  snippets – otherwise I’ll just fall further and further behind.
Think of it as a smorgasbord, or at least a snack buffet. 
Hope there’s something you like and that it’s not all tomato and celery (foods of the evil one) 
There will probably be three or four posts put on together rather than one hoolying great big long one.
Tasmania II
So, we were in Tasmania. And we were realising that a lot of Australia is stolen. Certainly a lot of the place names are swiped from the UK, maybe out of some strange sense of nostalgia for the country which banished them forever to the other side of the world. We stayed a week not far from Derby and St Helens, neither of which look much like their UK namesakes. The Sheffield in Tasmania has palm trees – and when we stayed the night in Swansea (tiny coastal town – all the restaurants close at 8pm and the town’s free wifi gets switched on and off by the lady in the local Information Office each day “in case the internet gets used up”!) we noticed a large sign proudly celebrating that it won the title of “Australia’s Tidiest Town, 2007”! There, Welsh Swansea, beat that!
I like it that Australia has a tidiest town competition. Brits have “Village in Bloom” and “City of Culture” whereas the Australians are happy so long as it’s tidy. 
Quite a few of the towns in Tasmania seem to have a particular “specialism”. There’s Railton, which is known as Topiary town on account of its many sculptured hedges: there’s Sheffield, the “Town of murals” and the awesome “Town of the painted poles” (Lilydale). You have got to wonder what kind of town meeting they had that ended up deciding that this would be the best thing they could become famous for.
“OK everybody, we all know people are flocking to Railton to see their fancy-dancy topiary, and the murals are all well and good for “Look at us, we paint on walls” Sheffield, I’ve seen scarecrows appearing in the gardens of some of the towns – so we need to get creative – we need an edge – something that sets us apart. Think, everybody think harder than you’ve ever thought before. We need something that will catapult us to the top of the “reasons to visit a small town that’s not necessarily on the way to anywhere we were actually going to” list.
(Sound of the occasional chair scraping and people heavy thinking) 

(Finally…..) “Well, I’ve got three bits of fence post I could paint.”

“Ooooohhhh” “like it!” “Yes!” “We could use different colours” “Brilliant – let’s do it people!”

We drove through Lilydale, town of the painted posts – but we didn’t see any. Come on Lilydaleites, get your poles out.
There is also a tiny village called “Nowhere Else”. What an awesome name.
Not sure, when you think about it, why they didn’t just call it “Here”.
Finally, the famous (around these parts) Doo Town in which most of the houses are named with “Doo” names. In the 1930s someone started the trend when they called their house “Doo I” and then a neighbour changed their house to be called “Doo We” and, perhaps because there is not much to do in the evenings, others followed suit so today there are “Doo” names for most houses. “Doo Little” “Gonna Doo” Doodle Doo” “Love me Doo” and many more adorn the gate posts. (One killjoy has called theirs “Medhurst” but I don’t think they get invited to many parties.)
We didn’t get across to Doo Town, but we did see a duck billed platypus in the wild in a pond, which was nice. 
We spent a few nights in Hobart (second deepest natural harbour in the world, if you’re interested) and while there we managed to drive up the wrong mountain while trying to find the awesome viewpoint which looks down over the city and surrounds. The proper view point is on Mount Wellington, but the mountains weren’t labeled and we headed off, under my skilful navigating, to find it. We drove out of the city and saw a sign for a lookout post and followed the road up and round and up and up and at many of the corners we caught glimpses of another mountain which Ella kept on saying looked higher than the one we were driving up. I am male and therefore my sense of direction and correctness is unerring so I confirmed that we had agreed that whoever was driving had to listen to the navigator and we ploughed on. 
We got to the top of Mount Nelson and couldn’t see much – mainly trees and, if we turned round, a massive mountain towering behind us. So Ella turned the car round and we eventually found the road which led up Mount Wellington. from the top the view was stunning.  
When we flew back from Tasmania to Melbourne it was via JetStar: Jetstar is what the ugly love child would look like if Easyjet and Ryanair had an affair. 

An Argument

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Ella met a lady in a cafe and, in the time it took me to stand dithering at the counter deciding what it might be that Australians call a normal filter coffee she had had a lovely conversation in which it transpired this lady had been on holiday with her husband for 2 weeks and was ready to kill him. At that precise moment he wasn’t there because she had sent him off to look round some gardens as she figured they needed a bit of breathing room. Hearing that we were 10 weeks in to a trip she wondered how on earth we were still talking. 

I guess you can never be fully sure how you are going to get along sharing the same space almost every second of the day for so long. We hit a bit of a barrier last week and had the closest we’ve come to an argument. Some couples argue a lot and shout and make up and get along that way. We tend not to. We don’t really argue. That’s not to say we always see eye to eye and always get on – we just don’t seem to have the necessary pieces to our personalities that would combust when brought together. Sometimes I’m sure that if we both flew off the handle about a particular thing, then made up, we’d end up resolving the matter far quicker than our normal method – our normal method is second guessing the other person. We were probably second, third and fourth guessing one another last week before I let slip with a comment that hadn’t been passed through my normal set of several filters first. So Ella went for a walk to figure what hadn’t been said. (Most people “say” stuff – we more often “don’t say” things which makes it much more tricky but allows for far more wiggle room.) When she came back and made sure I’d eaten – always wise – we figured we were going a little stir crazy and needed to stop trying to think what the other person wanted to do all the time and instead, when asked what I or she would want to do, to say what we actually want to do rather than what we think the other person wants us to say we want them to think we want to do.
It was good to get that cleared up. 
Two months in – one blip. Still learning after 29 years. 

Melbourne

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Melbourne

We flew from Tasmania to Melbourne for a week after which we feel we can scientifically compare the great rival cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
I thought people from Sydney were called Sheila and Wayne, but apparently they’re called Sydneysiders. And one thing that many of them do is to over-exaggeratedly swing their arms when they walk. It was one of those things that, when you point it out you then see all over the place. 
Melbourne had a very different feel. It doesn’t have the wow factor that Sydney has with the harbour, bridge, opera house (and people there keep their arms sensibly close to their bodies), but Melbourne feels much quirkier and characterful. Better cafés and better coffees. And there are free trams in the city centre! 
We went to the cathedral in Melbourne for a Good Friday service – Stainer’s Crucifixion was being sung, primarily by the choir but we were allowed to join in a few hymns. I read that Stainer himself didn’t think much of what he had written. Say what you want about him, he was a good judge.
Watching the news on Easter Day was a little odd compared to the UK as they had quite a long news report on church services and the meaning of Easter and they showed a fair number of interviews with people about why they were at church. It was all done in a relaxed and very natural way – it wouldn’t have been reported nearly so openly in Britain.
On Easter Monday I went to my first Aussie Rules Football game. It’s a sort of cross between rugby, soccer, basketball and a punch up outside a night club. 
I enjoyed it.
It was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground which housed the cricket World Cup final the week before in which Australia beat New Zealand to much antipodean joy and despair. It had been transformed from a cricket pitch to an Aussie Rules pitch by taking the stumps out, drawing a big square and two big semi circles and sticking quite a few goal posts here and there. It was the first game of the season for Hawthorne Hawks, last year’s league winners, against their arch rivals the Geelong Cats. Nearly 80,000 were watching and it seemed a pretty good, if massively one sided game with the Hawks whupping the Cats 123 to 61. 
Basic rules as far as I could make out: you have to try and kick the ball through the middle two of the four goal posts and if you do that you get 6 points but if you only manage to get it between one of the middle and outer posts instead then they give you a point for trying. That’s the encouraging Australian way.
There was a lot of dropping the ball and fumbling after it on the floor and people ran into one another fairly frequently and someone got a bit knocked out. It looked like a Scotland rugby training session. 
I was supporting the Hawks so I can hold my head high. “Go Hawks”.
Teams in various sports often take to the field to the sound of a particularly rousing and emotive song. “We are the champions” or “We will rock you” or something similarly inspiring… If you get the chance, please, please listen to the youtube clips of the anthems for the Hawthorn Hawks and the Geelong Cats. These were what the rough, tough, Aussie rules players came out to on Monday, I kid you not.
For the Hawthorns go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfy4LFWn5Rg

For the Geelong song go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukW4VVCV9LQ

Honest – these are what the crowds sing and the players get pumped up to – it was like some bizarre Monty Python sketch. Each of the main league teams have a song of the same ilk. Let the English Premier League take note!!
And, in passing, is it only in Australia that they get to rename the global phenomenon that is McDonald’s? Here, it’s called Macca’s. 

Gotta love Australia. 

 

Tasmania – comfort, convicts, compliments…

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Comfort. That’s a lovely word, isn’t it? Comfort. What things do you associate with it I wonder. Granny’s all enfolding hugs where, as a child, you’re lost to the world in a heady wave of lavender oil and the colour purple. Or a big mug of steaming soup beside a raging fire on a winter’s evening. A big, fluffy bath towel. No – bath sheet – they’re bigger.

That’ll do for starters – granny’s hugs, big soup mugs, fluffy towel. Definitely things of comfort. 

I’ll tell you what comfort is not. Comfort is definitely not two nearly 50 year olds sharing a thin single mattress that’s laid out in the back of an old station wagon in a lay by next to the main road on the East coast of Tasmania. 

We’re in Tasmania. And that’s wonderful. We’re sleeping in a car. And that’s — uncomfortable! 

When you’re of an age where you have got wonderfully well used to your own, old, familiar bed. And if you’re the sort of person who, when you set out round the world, seriously consider if there is room in your one bag to fit your three pillows from your own, old, familiar bed. And then you’re lying in the back of a car on the very edge of Tasmania and count up that you’ve had 22 different beds since leaving the UK just 9 weeks ago. And now you’re sleeping in a car and your body is adopting positions that God probably didn’t have in mind when he designed them.

In the middle of the night I was a little concerned to realise that I couldn’t feel my legs. Nor my left arm. Nor the left side of my face. Fearing I’d suffered a stroke it was a relief when I discovered that I couldn’t feel the car door either, nor the roof. I couldn’t feel anything because my fingers had gone totally numb. I bashed my anaesthetised hand against the car door in amusement until it woke Ella who thought we might be being attacked. 

If you do have to sleep in a car, at least this one is cool. It’s a very beaten up station wagon with dents and dings all over: war wounds from run ins with bush life and wildlife. It has bits hanging off it and its spare tyre is pretty much just as useful as mine. The car is old and full of character. This car is what Tommy Lee Jones would look like if he was turned into a Mitsubishi.

We’d had two nights in an AirB&B in Hobart, so this was to help balance the budget.

And it has its compensations – we awoke looking out over probably the Indian or the Pacific Ocean. Almost certainly one of them, or possibly the Tasman Sea. Geography is not my strongpoint. Anyway, it was a long beach, a lot of water and very pretty. Looking out of the other window there was a highway with trucks rumbling down it.

 

We’ll have to find out some time if it’s legal to spend the night in a lay by in Australia. But for now I’d rather rely on a healthy dose of ignorance. Ignorance is, after all, bliss – and it’s also cheaper than knowledge sometimes.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it was illegal, as Australians seem obsessed with laws. I’ve never seen anywhere with so many signs telling you what you can’t do.

And this doesn’t surprise me as modern Australia was invented by convicts, so they were used to having lots of rules.

On our way down to Hobart we stopped in a place pretty much in the middle of Tasmania called Campbell Town. One of the features of the town is the long lines of bricks set into the pavement and stretching either side of the main street. On each brick is engraved the name of a convict sent out from the UK, it gives their age, their crime and their sentence, and often one line to include any subsequent detail known about their later life. Reading them was humbling and sobering. 7 years for a 14 year old boy for stealing bread. Life imprisonment for a 22 year old for burglary. Sarah Brame, age 23, stole 2 brooches, sentenced to 14 years. She was shipped over with her 2 daughters. 

Many thousands of convicts came to Tasmania to serve their sentence. To the South East of the island, on the end of what might be an isthmus (spell check hasn’t objected to that so it might be the word I’m thinking of) anyway, a lump of land connected to the mainland by a narrow strip less than 100m wide is the site of Port Arthur, where we spent the day. It was set up in the 19th century as a prison and housed over a thousand convicts at the height of its popularity. A dumping ground for the overflowing prisons of the UK – conditions were often brutal and escape was infrequent.

One of the documented escape attempts involved a prisoner getting as far as the narrow stretch of land just mentioned (called Fisheagle Neck) which, as it was effectively the only way off the peninsula and was easy to guard, had a permanent group of soldiers stationed there. Our intrepid escapee had come across a dead kangaroo, skinned it and sort of climbed into the skin and then, just as night fell he hopped past the guard post and off down the narrow strip towards the mainland. It was an excellent plan given the fading light and the soldiers’ lack of intimate knowledge of kangaroos. 

However, they were hungry. They fancied a steak. And there was a pretty slow moving meal hopping away from them. One of the soldiers ran after the kangaroo and raised his gun. History didn’t relate exactly what the soldier thought when the kangaroo screamed: “Don’t shoot!” and proceeded to skin itself. 

Although, if the guards were anything like the Tasmanians of today, they would probably have congratulated the prisoner on his escape attempt: “Truly excellent escape attempt Mr Prisoner. Absolutely awesome try!” for Tasmanians, we have discovered, are the most wildly enthusiastically encouraging people on the planet. Just ridiculously so. We all know that the first words an Australian baby speaks are “No worries” – and continues having to say it at least 8 times an hour for the rest of their life. But Tasmanians combine that with over the top encouragement. For example – I conduct a simple exchange at the local supermarket. I place my purchases on the conveyor belt – the assistant beeps them, I hand over cash. “Well done. Outstanding job!” comes booming out from him. I, being British, assume he’s being sarcastic. Look for signs of irony or even mild contempt. No. Pure unadulterated encouraging positivity is dripping down his countenance and all over his counter. And this is magnified all over the island. 

“Way to go!” upon my achieving the impressive feat of buying a newspaper. “Aw well done, beautiful job!” on Ella totally buying a bus ticket. 

I’m not sure how they would react to our doing something actually truly clever: maybe their heads explode.

We mentioned this trait to a couple with whom we’re staying and they laughed it off saying that they hadn’t ever noticed but were then amused when we pointed out 5 occasions they went on to do exactly that during the meal. It must just be so ingrained in their psyche that it becomes unconscious habit.

Australians certainly seem a lot happier in general than Brits. Maybe it’s that they feel so amazingly affirmed when completing even the simplest task.

I think they should change their national anthem and have instead the song from the Lego Movie. It would be brilliant to see at the medal ceremony at the Olympics, or before a rugby match, or at the state opening of parliament – everyone standing proud and then: “Everything is Awesome, everything is cool when you’re part of a team” blares from the speakers. Who wouldn’t get up and dance along to it? 

This level of constant unremitting encouragement just doesn’t happen in the UK.

I’m still a little suspicious of why the Tasmanians compliment the simplest achievement. Maybe it’s just done to Brits. Maybe they have such a low expectation of us that when we manage to walk and talk at the same time without banging into something they are genuinely thrilled. 

Which is better to be? Typical Tasmanian person complimenting everyone and everything in the same over the top manner, or a Brit who compliments far less frequently but, when it happens, far more meaningfully?      I know full well that a large chunk of my personality that should be devoted to encouraging people, or building them up, is missing. It’s not something I deliberately don’t do – it just doesn’t cross my mind to do it at the time. 

I definitely do not encourage enough. What about you? Do you easily say “well done.”  If you do then, “that’s amazing! Awesome job!”

Should you be a little more Tasmanian?

I think I should.

 

 

A night at the Commune……..

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(This is a little longer post than usual – and there will be some photos and thoughts appearing soon on the  Photo Gallery page – just so’s you know.)

 

Oo-err, we left you on a cliff hanger…..   Sorry for all the sleepless nights you’ll have endured – but to continue….

Outside of Sydney – linked to the city by a train track life line lies an innocuous little suburban town with an unprepossessing station. Across the road from the station is a German Social Club. It is the home to, among other things many of which are probably good and lovely, a German folk choir – and we had been invited to hear them rehearsing, and following the rehearsal to return with our Couch Surfing host to his “paradise” on earth.

For those of you for whom the term “couch surfing” is new and merely sounds like something doomed to failure no matter how Australian and macho the person surfing with a couch might be, Couch Surfing is the term given to an internet based initiative whereby people who have a spare room, or a spare couch, or a spare floor space which they are happy to have someone use for the night at no charge, advertise said room/couch/space and people traveling and looking for cheap accommodation can get in touch and see if the potential host is happy/able to host them for a night or two.

When we saw Rowan’s profile on the couch surfing web site it looked “interesting”. He said his ambition was to build the ultimate fairy-tale kingdom with a new community free from the constraints and shackles of the modern world. A self-sufficient community living among nature.

Well, you can’t pass up an opportunity like that, can you?

We had exchanged a few emails and arranged to go and stay for a few nights. He told us that he was singing in a German folk choir on Wednesday evening and if we could get to the venue he would give us a lift back to his home/community from there.

So, that’s how we came to be sitting amongst a misshapen mixture of Germans, Austrians, French and Brits on a Wednesday evening in an innocuous Sydney suburb.

I don’t exactly pride myself in this ability – but I don’t mind saying I am pretty good at not laughing at someone or something when it’s not appropriate. This comes in handy in my line of work. And it came in handy several times during an evening in which we felt like we had drifted into a parallel universe at times. 

The choir were the kind that any conductor would find a tad challenging. No one could fault their enthusiasm. 

One might find fault in their pitch, tone, volume, musical interpretation, proclivity to reading novels at the same time as singing, musical interpretation – maybe. But you could not fault their enthusiasm.

They practised for 2 hours. 

It wasn’t enough.

But, finally and thankfully it ended and we piled into the back of a small 2 door car along with Rowan, Rowan’s dad Manfred, Rowan’s Canadian girlfriend and their dog. 

To take a brief step back: when we arrived at the singing club we were early and the first person there was Manfred – and during the first ten minutes of conversation we had with him, as he sat reading “A Jewish Guide to Adultery”, he had only really referenced sex, and the words for toilet in each language he knew. He looked to be in his late 80s so it’s probably good that he had a hobby. The only thing we ever learned about Manfred’s wife was that she had twice accidentally run over their dogs.

On the journey back Rowan decided it would be best if he unleashed his personal philosophy of life onto us. 

He began with: “My plan is to build a brand new civilisation! Nothing less!” He proceeded to drive at break-neck speed, looking occasionally at the road but mainly, and very scarily, back over his shoulder at us, studying our reactions to his “revelations”. 

Basically, he sees himself as a sort of saviour and prophet and teacher. He operates on a higher plane than anyone else and has been impregnated with knowledge of how we are exactly halfway through a 26,000 year cycle before the end of the earth (currently in a 40 year changeover period between the two 13,000 year “halves” and we are currently passing through the blue light of the sun in its binary star system which NASA know all about but refuse to tell us. It’s illegal to use most of our brain and all governments and monetary systems are tools of total suppression from which we should free ourselves. 

So, you see, some of what he said made sense. But most of it was stark staring crazy. And, disappointingly, it was just run of the mill, boring sort of crazy. If he had been merely extremely eccentric, that would be OK, but he was just unhinged.

Apart from anything else he was wearing a Tyrolian cap and short shorts and he couldn’t have looked more German if you had stuck a dachshund on his head and covered him in sauerkraut. I like Germans – but this one did not do the rest of them any favours. 

The community he is hoping to build is nothing more than a bit of a tax dodge and his permanent followers number approximately zero. I have to approximate because I’m not sure his girlfriend is a follower as she goes away in a few months when her visa runs out and she didn’t seem to follow what he was saying. 

I don’t think any of us followed what he was saying. Lots about the well trodden prophecy from the Mayans (they didn’t get 2012 wrong so much as it was speaking about him, apparently).

The journey flew by. At least, the countryside flew by. He drives like he talks; rapidly and with no concern for others. I have only ever been truly scared by two drivers: one of the guys in the rugby club I played for when we were in Scotland who was known as “The Pope” – not because he was particularly religious, but because when you had been driven in a car by him you kissed the ground when you finally got out. The Pope was the first truly scary driver – Rowan was the second. Also, it being a two door car, we couldn’t even jump out on the few occasions he slowed down. 

I also made the mistake of arguing with him. 

There are several types of people you should not argue with. Gunmen, airport security guards, your mother. And some people it is truly pointless arguing with. Drunks and certifiably mad people being two. Applying logic against his rant against religion was like handing a lettuce leaf to a charging lion and hoping it would make him vegetarian. 

When we arrived at Rowan’s commune and the car finally became unfamiliarly stationary, we emerged into his “wonderland”. A couple of portacabins, a mobile home, a tepee, a communal area of covered seating attached to a lean-to housing a kitchen zone and a couple of shed-like dwellings placed next to one another with what looked like doorways linking them. All this within a large, sloping area of countryside with a river running through it.

We were told that we would be in the tepee. On unlashing the door flap we were faced with spartan accommodation. Which was fine. The bed was strangely moist for such a warm night – we left it to hopefully air for a while and went to the communal seating area to see who our fellow inmates might be. 

There were 6 or 7 gap year students there that night, passing through, and an older guy from Wigan who was “fighting the system” which, it transpired, meant he lived with his girlfriend and they both claimed unemployment benefit, child benefit for her child and child maintenance from the ex-husband. This way, he said, he was avoiding “putting back into the system”. Ella asked him if he had thought about trying to live a self sufficient life and he looked dismayed saying: “That’s really hard work! Growing food and stuff, I’d rather not do anything at all and live out my ideology.” He was not pleasant to talk to.

The students were mainly European and seemed to stay there for between one night and a couple of weeks, occasionally helping to  build new shelters and generally living rent free and enjoying freedom from parental rules. They seemed a nice bunch. None of them were devotees of Rowan’s “vision”.

We were thankful that the saviour had turned in for the night having struck out on his unsubtle hints about the benefits of free love. (Having asked Ella and me if we were ‘together’ or just friends and being told we’ve been happily married for 29 years looked Ella in the eye and slimed: “that is such a pity for all the men out there.” Not a good line. If you think it is, ask a woman and listen closely to the answer…..) His father did appear, uttered some probably unintentional racist comments about some of those gathered and went off to check that none of the dogs had been run over. Ella and I went to the tepee to compare levels of unease. 

Sleep came easily.

To Sleeping Beauty in the fairy story. 

To us – it didn’t, really. 

Ella and I weighed up our options. They seemed to consist of: 

A.) stay on site and hide from people who were wanting some free love and/or might for all we knew get some crazy ideas and go all Jim Jones on us.

B.) bravely and heroically run away.

C.) evangelise our host with the news of an altogether more complete saviour. 

After a sleepless night we went for B.

And so  next morning, in the 40 degree heat of a cloudless day we grabbed our (thankfully, singular) bags and sneaked out of the compound to hitch a ride to the nearest town.

Everyone knows Aussies are friendly and helpful and likely to stop and give lifts to people. 

Well then, everyone….. you’re wrong.

After an overly long passage of walking and earnestly waving our thumbs at anyone who passed, (our admittedly unpolished technique included, at times, exuberant dancing and using a variety of “winning smiles”, all to no avail) we were getting a tad disappointed. Also a tad dehydrated. We were in the middle of nowhere somewhere out near the Blue Mountains. We weren’t definitely certain we were even going in the right direction for the nearest town. Cars, when they appeared, were not stopping: most seemed to actually speed up when they saw us, and a few drivers gave little waves which might have meant “we’re turning off soon so we’re probably no use to you” or more likely “I don’t want to let any hot air in as the air con is having to work overtime to keep me deliciously cool in here”. 

I was, it must be said, getting a little ungenerous in my thoughts by this stage.

Luckily I had picked as my hitching buddy someone who, when she sees an old man in the distance on a ride on lawnmower cutting the grass at the back of his farmhouse will jump the fence and chase him to ask for water and directions.

Having nearly scared the life out of him (he was old, heading away from us and hadn’t expected anyone to be running after him out here in the middle of the day in the middle of his private land) he was kind enough to take us into his entirely ancient tumbledown farmhouse and offer a mug of water from the sink, next to which his teeth sat (“darned things need grinding down: still don’t fit right”).

He told us that it would be an “awful long” walk into town and then he wonderfully and heroically offered us a lift, though it would be a bit of a squeeze. The only transport in evidence in the yard was the ride on mower but even if he had meant riding all the way on that we would still have said yes please. As it was he took us to an old barn and drove out a beat up pick up truck into which we happily squeezed and he drove us into the nearest town. It took about 20 minutes so I’m not sure what that would have been in hot on-foot minutes.

We took the next train out of town – which, thankfully, was heading into Sydney and we spent the afternoon at the harbour, generally giving thanks that we were alive and wondering where we should spend the night as we’d been due to stay on the commune for a few days and hadn’t made other plans. 

We walked up to an area called The Rocks, not far from the harbour, and booked into the youth hostel there. With our youthful looks and ready cash we secured the last available room for that evening, according to the receptionist. I doubt that there are many better youth hostel views than from the rooftop terrace of the Sydney YHA building – overlooking the harbour, bridge and Opera House. It looked good in the day – even better at night.

We decided to try a little high-end Aussie dining that evening and so went to The Australian Bar and ate kangaroo and emu pizza.

Happy to have done it.

Happy not to do it again.

We spent the next day on the quayside at Sydney Harbour. 

A huge cruise liner had parked and disgorged hundreds of happy cruisers and a sponsored walk by several hundred foursomes was making its way round the quay and it all added to the buzz of life in one of the world’s iconic venues. 

As we sat and sipped our credit-card-worrying coffees and enjoyed seeing all the life passing by with all the stories they held, the snippets of conversations heard, we reflected on the disappointment of the trip to the commune. We’d hoped for a quirkiness, an insightful lifestyle philosophy, something to make us think deeply, but instead got a worryingly sleepless night in an airless wigwam in the stomping ground of an unwanted self-proclaimed messiah.

I have spared the dear reader from the majority of the rantings of Rowan for the sake of brevity and sanity and knowing it’s often hard enough to follow my sentences anyway – but I have to admit that throughout his ranting about the church and how it has acted through the ages (though I’d happily but fruitlessly argue with him over his interpretation of who he thinks lies behind it all), his attack on religion and religiosity was probably his most cogent line of thought.

I wonder how people responded when Christ said he was the saviour and stated that history would pivot around his incarnation. For those hearing it fresh it must have only left the choice of madman or messiah. Having experienced the real thing, and a Germanic/Australian mimic, I’m happy to stay where I am.

I’m not joining the commune.