Winds of Change

I'm surprised to find that this blog has been going now for about 18 months - we've been in Australia for almost a year, and in 9 day's time it will be a year since we physically left the UK.

I find myself wondering, what purpose this blog is serving now? My intention was to provide a two-way link between us, Michael/Sara/Ella/Patrick as we moved away from all our friends to start a new life in Australia, and the family and friends we have left behind.

I wanted this blog to be a source of more information and reassurance about us, what we're doing AND I wanted it to be a way of communicating across time zones when phoning doesn't always work... I viewed it as a tool to go alongside things like the Skype numbers we arranged so that people could phone us for the cost of a UK telephone call rather than paying international call fees, email, writing letters, sending postcards etc.

But I have to say that it isn't really working in the way I anticipated because I'm NOT GETTING ANY FEEDBACK! Writing this blog has become like putting messages into a black hole: I put lots of stuff in and, with a few exceptions (you know who you are!), I get virtually nothing back. Maybe this blog has done its job TOO well and those of you who read it regularly know what's happening to us, what the shape of our lives is, so there's nothing left to talk about if you call.

Pathetic, aren't I? I think I've hit a bit of a 'wall' being here. The reality of how far away I am physically from my old life and how, after a year, you have to get on with your busy lives without me in just the same way as I have had to make a life for myself without you, are hitting home. I do feel really, really 'sick' for the old certainties of my life which I guess is a reaction to twelve months spent trying to cope with a lot of new stuff... I am definitely tired. There's still a huge hole where my friends and family used to be, and it takes time to make new friends and create a 'whole' life in a new country.

Anyway, the upshot of all this introspection is that I've decided to 'retire' the off-to-oz blog. We're not 'off to' anywhere; we're here; we've been here for almost a year. Time to start thinking about other things. So here's what will happen: I will stop posting to off-to-oz shortly, although the blog as it is now will still exist so you'll be able to visit and look at photos etc if you want to. Michael and I are going to do a new blog together that will document the amusements of our house building project (as and when that starts!), and I'm going to start using my art blog more.

Both the house blog and the art blog will probably end up with some 'family' stuff on them, but in the main I think we're going to go back to the old-fashioned methods of communicating via the post, telephone and email.

So ta-ta for now and I'll drop you an email with the new blog details in due course.

Sara xx

The Tuesday Cow

We've had the Monday heron; now we have the Tuesday cow. I couldn't understand why Toby was barking; then I noticed a cute heifer wandering around the garden. It was just as curious about me as I was about it, and it let me get quite close with my camera. Eventually it got bored and mooched off to see the grass on the other side of the road. Luckily we live on a VERY quiet road.

The wildlife here is great (well, the stuff with 2 - 4 legs, anyway). We have swallows nesting under the car port and they sit very cosily together in the evenings, snuggled up in the corner; there's a hare that we've spotted along the verge several times; there are kookaburras and plovers in the paddock; kangaroos and wallabies regularly jump across the grass; little lizards run around in the sun on the deck; and satin bowerbirds, a butcher bird and lots of mynah birds fly around the garden. Hoorah for nature!

Now it's the caterpillars

What is it with the bloody insects around here? Not content with spiders the size of small plates in my bathroom, or enormous crickets that look as if they've been armour-plated in the guest room, I am now afflicted with poisonous caterpillars falling onto me from trees. It isn't funny and it isn't clever.

There I was, wandering around the garden, suitably attired - so I thought - in socks, proper shoes, long trousers and elbow-length leather gauntlets (I'm not kidding), when I felt something land on my neck and brushed it off. Tum te tum, I gather some beautiful azaleas to put in a vase and return to the house. A short while later I feel something on my neck again and flick it off. It lands on the workbench and I notice a small hairy caterpillar. 'Oh!', I thought. 'Hairy caterpillars are often an irritant to the birds that try and eat them.' So I gingerly scooped it onto a bit of card and chucked it out of the door.

An hour or so later my neck began to be a bit itchy and I thought I must have been bitten by a mosquito, but no! I have a caterpillar-trail of hives all around my neck, with new lumps appearing by the minute. My neck is, in fact, red, swollen and almost unbearably itchy and I am feeling a bit pissed off. I can't cover it up because it's so itchy, so I'm attracting a lot of unwelcome 'looks' as well as unwelcome pests. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE BLOODY INSECTS IN THIS PLACE?

Dogs and little fishes

Poor old Toby's in the vet hospital again with another paralysis tick, poor thing. You know your dog is ill when it sniffs at its favourite treat but isn't capable of eating it! Michael and I are feeling very guilty that we didn't spot the damned tick, but at least we did spot the symptoms and get him to the vet in time. I hate to think what could have happened if both of us worked away from home: we might have come home this evening to find Toby dead on the carpet... Hopefully he's going to be OK: we rang the vet this afternoon but were told it takes 12 hours before it really becomes apparent which way things are going to go but he did say that at least we'd been able to get Toby admitted in good time. Oh dear!

On a lighter note, we took Ella out this afternoon (she is going back to school tomorrow after her chicken pox/ear infection) and went to get the first fish for our newly set up aquarium! Those of you who visited us in Bristol may remember the octagonal column tank we used to have in our hallway. We've had lots of fun here filling it and getting it set up: our first thought was to use bore water, which is what we have as a water source for all our water needs, but the pet shop staff told me that it was too full of minerals for tropical fish and that we'd better use rain water instead. Thankfully with the aid of all available water-holding receptacles in the house we were able to collect enough rainwater to fill the tank in a single evening: 100 litres off the roof in a few hours! After several days of settling down we've now put in 6 assorted Platys and 2 different small cat fish. We'll see how they go. Having only seen red Platys with black fins or orange Platys with red tails it was interesting to see greater variations in their colour: we've got two ordinary red ones with back fins, one orange one with a red tail (named 'Sylvie' by Ella), one almost black one with a bit of red ('Black Spot'), one with metallic gold sides ('Shimmer'), and one orangey-red one ('Daisy'). I suspect that we have a mix of males and females as we had last time, so hopefully around Christmas when the tank's had time to settle down we might have Platy babies again!

Panoramas

I've been busy with Photoshop, learning as I go! I keep taking these panorama photographs with the intention of stitching them together but haven't got round to it until now. I thought you might like to see where we're now living, and where we're going to live.






This is obviously the back of the house, taking photographs from the paddock fence. So there's 10 acres of grass and trees and large ponds that you can't see, behind me as I took the photos. The other side of the house isn't very exciting... The main body of the house is an 'L' shape, with the other arm of the 'L' behind our bedroom and extending around the back of the pool and deck area.










This is a view up the hill towards the back of our block, showing the way in which it curves into the hill and is embraced by the ridge which runs up one side, around the back, and down the other side. The geophysical surveys show that the bowl of the hill is subject to landslides so we will use it for garden, paddocks and orchard i.e. things that don't matter if there is a slip... As the left hand boundary and the back are all koala habitat we shall be building on the ridge running down the right hand edge of the block, indicated on the photo. We recently engaged a man to come in with big machinery and clear out the undergrowth on the site, so this picture was taken afterwards, when it had dried off enough for us to be able to go up there with our architect, Christian, and take a fresh look at the proposed new house site. Christian seems enthusiastic, even though it means a complete re-draw of his plans to take in a steeper slope and smaller footprint for the house. We're awaiting the plans with interest.

Bluebottles

A few weeks ago we had big sea storms and when I walked Toby on the beach I found Bluebottles - the first of these infamous Australian nuisances that I've seen. They're reknowned for affecting paddlers and surfers and in 'the season' many beaches are closed. In severe cases of stinging people have died, but for most people an encounter with a Bluebottle ends up in excruciating pain and nasty scars...


For the first day or two I only found small numbers of tiny Bluebottles, but then I went down one morning and the high-tide mark was just covered in thousands of them, some of them a good 6 inches long although that isn't their maximum size.

Strictly speaking Bluebottles (Physalia Physalis) aren't jellyfish but Siphonophores, colonies of polyps and medusoids. They have a translucent 'float' which is tinged blue around the edges and gives its common name, but they're actually a type of Portuguese Man o'War. Larger Bluebottles trail strings of stinging cells over a metre long in the water, trapping small fish and crustaceans, but these small examples only had strings of about a foot long.














I found it all quite eerie and was glad that - owing to the storms and the general state of the weather - I'd elected to wear my wellies on the beach! When I found large masses of them, some quite fresh, I was worried Toby might tread on some stings and be badly affected but he was oblivious to the danger and I think I would have known about it if he'd been stung...

Yeah, yeah, I've been busy...

Those of you who have witnessed the vastness of my baggage on previous visits will be surprised to hear that I managed to spend a single night in Sydney with only one, half-full rucksack... There were two reasons for this: firstly I was only there for a night and didn't think that merited checked-in luggage, and secondly it seems that a bunch of world leaders thought they'd drop in on Sydney to have some APEC meeting, do a bit of shopping and catch up with the animals at the zoo. The resulting security lock-down in Sydney is amazing and ridiculous and I felt it would be better to be travelling light.

APEC is all Sydney-siders seem to be talking about at the moment, from the taxi driver to the newsagent. I wanted to see things that are close to or within the security perimeter and although all the information said it would be 'business as usual' at least at this end of the week, it really wasn't. For starters there is now a 5-kilometer 12 foot high metal and mesh fence around the CBD and the Opera House, which has closed roads and created pedestrian 'check points' at designated crossings. While I wasn't stopped and searched I was certainly scrutinised, by CCTV, the many groups of policemen and 'HazMat' agents ('hazardous materials', I gather) and the strange cars with jamming and video surveillance equipment cruising down the streets. Restaurants and cafes around Circular Quay are empty; I had the restaurant at the MCA to myself when I stopped long enough to have a coffee; and the staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens Shop greeted me like a long-lost friend after I'd braved a maze of blocked turnings, police blockades and manned crossings to find a way into the gardens to see the orchid displays...

I have never experienced anything like it, not just from a practical 'how do I now get from A to B?' point of view but also from the simmering resentment that is evident. People in the city are actively furious: how dare Bush swan into town with his 250 CIA agents, 4 chefs and 3 plane loads of staff - and, to make it worse - arbitarily decide to arrive two days earlier than planned in order to have a 'bi-lateral lunch' with Johnnie Howard, thus throwing all the careful arrangements into disorder? Australian tax payers will be footing a bill $370 million dollars - which includes optional day-trips for the entourage, including a visit to the zoo animals. Note that I didn't say 'to the zoo' - oh no. That would be too much of a security risk, so star animals have been transported to Garden Island from Taronga Park so that the ladies who lunch can view them in comfort and in more easily defendable surroundings.

Apparently we're all supposed to feel honoured and priviledged that Bush agreed to Howard's request to hold the meeting in little old Australia. I think it might have been planned as a triumphant proclamation of Australia's "special relationship" with the USA in the twilight of Howard's loyal premiership, just before the November elections and I suspect it was thought that the war in Iraq would be 'going well' by now so the meeting could be seen as a pat on the back for Howard. Sad how things turn out, isn't it? Sydney-siders are furious about the disruption, Australian tax-payers are furious about the bill, and every second person is scathing about the war. So I hope everyone enjoys their little outings around the Harbour this week: a Southerly change has blown in and as my flight took off it began to pour with rain.

Smoke, seaweed and strange doings at school...

It amazes me how quickly one becomes acclimatised in a new country. It is a cold, windy day today, and by that I mean that it's only 18.5° C outside (and it feels a couple of degrees cooler than that with the wind factored in). A year ago in Bristol I would have considered that T shirt weather and here I am, rugged up in jeans, jumper, socks, sheepskin slippers and a fleece, huddled over my nice warm lap top and looking forward to using the wood-burning heater at our new place! My hands are freezing...

Outside it's quite misty but the 'mist' is actually smoke, accompanied by a pervasive smell of burnt wood. Yesterday, if you drove into town, you could see a huge column of smoke rising up behind the hills west of Coffs Harbour, and the clouds had a yellowish tinge to them. I'm not sure where the fire was, but I'm presuming it was in the Orara valley - I'm waiting for the arrival of the local newspaper to see whether it was a wild fire or whether it was the Rural Fire Service 'burning off' the woodland understorey in order to reduce the fire risk later in the year. Last week there was a notice in the papers about controlled burn-off, but it was supposedly up the coast not inland.

Anyway, we did lots of things this morning, including visiting our friends Carol and Ian's newly purchased house up at Lake Russell Drive which is about 10 kilometers north of here (so when we move into the new rented house at Wakelands Road we'll be their side of Coffs Harbour too), and going into the property management agent for our new place to sign the lease and sort out the bond money. I can't wait! Well, I could do without the process of moving, but I am really excited about getting out of here and into there... Our removals company (Australians use the term 'removalists' but that sounds strange to my Pommie ears) dropped off some boxes this morning, and we're going to use a combination of us packing and them helping us pack. I'll be starting the process later this week when I've finished trying to do the company's Year End accounts. I'm not sure which is worse: frankly I'd like to put off both tasks for as long as possible, but that's not my way and I'll be digging into my envelope of expenses just as soon as I've finished this blog entry.

Toby was a good boy, sitting patiently in the car waiting for us to finish our business before we took him for a walk along the beach. It amazes me how quickly the beach landscape changes. A week or so ago we had really strong southerly swells that have completely changed the shape of the beach, and which deposited large quantities of shells on the sand. Ella and I have had great fun collecting things - Michael may have a point when he questions the amount of scavanged shells and rocks and interesting 'bits' that we now have lying around in plastic tubs! - and I've taken to bringing my camera down to the beach every time we take Toby for a walk. Here are some photos of some of things I was talking about in a previous blog post about the beach landscape:



The beach looks like a lunar landscape with big lumps of sea-plumes washed up




You can see the ends of the columns where the feathery things come out and catch plankton in their plumes

This colony was ripped out with so much force that its rock anchor was pulled out too!




Red sea urchins are all over the beach... If they've still got spines attached they're quite newly dead...



I found a couple of paler, orange ones this morning for the first time







This is a sea weed - a beautiful fan shape







Some colonies of sponge end up 'infected' with algae that turns them red







They look lovely against the darker green weeds...





Another clutch of egg capsules. I wonder what they are?



Oh yes, I was going to tell you about school... Well there I was mentioning about how quickly I've become acclimatized, but Ella's getting used to Australia pretty quickly too. She came home the other day and told us that her class has had to vacate its room - because of maggots dropping from the ceiling onto the kids!! I was horrified but she was very matter-of-fact about it. I had noticed - and commented to the teacher - that the heating wasn't working at the end of last term, and I was pleased to note that this term the classroom seemed nice and warm in the mornings. Apparently, shortly after the start of term the occupants noticed a sickly smell that got worse and worse, but no-one thought anything of it until dozens of maggots crawled across the ceiling and started dropping onto the kids and the desks, and people began to notice large numbers of maggots on the floor... Of course something has become trapped and died in the ceiling and is gently decomposing in the heat, but whereas this would - in the UK - be a cause for further investigation and alarm (and possibly reassuring communications with parents), here we are just going to wait until the unfortunate corpse has become skeletal, and then the kids can go back into the classroom again! Meantime they have to work outside or in the school hall.

Moving On.

Yep, we're moving. Again. On 13th or 14th August. Nine and a half months after we got here. Oh dear.

I can't say I'm looking forward to the process, either, but we're completely fed up with our managing agent and - apart from the views - we have concluded that this place just isn't worth the money we're paying for it. I found a new place for us to live while our house is being built, about 5 kms north up the road - in the opposite direction to where we're building, but it's still manageable.

For slightly more money we get a tennis court, a swimming pool, a nice-enough house, a garden, a vegetable patch and 10 acres (with mowing and grounds maintenance included in the rent), and enough room in the 'office' annex for me to move my studio in there too, thus saving the money I'm currently paying in rent on a place in Gallery 37, although I won't be moving the studio straight away...

Hopefully we'll be taking our phone number with us, so no changes there, and of course our email and Skype contact details will remain the same. I'll advise the actual address and confirm details a bit closer to the time.

Hooray for dentists

I spent an hour and a half in the dentist's chair this morning, and I have to say that it didn't hurt a bit and, what's more, the technology was really interesting - it appears that one dose of gum anaesthetic and I'm turning into a nerd...

I had to have a molar reconstructed, and it was frightening to see how little real tooth was left! Note to me: stand over Ella while she cleans her teeth, so that she doesn't have to endure needles the size of cricket bats and lots of fillings. Anyway, instead of the usual crown/root canal, I was offered the opportunity to try a 'Cerec' porcelain reconstruction. Once the original filling had been drilled out a photograph was taken of the tooth and fed into a machine. I could see a contour map of my molar in glorious technicolour on a computer screen; my dentist then used various 'tools' to draw around its edges to show where she wanted the porcelain reconstruction to end, and the programme then calculated how to build the reconstructed tooth. Once it had finished thinking about it, it took 17 minutes and a lot of whirring for it to build (using some kind of laser technology, I guess) a perfectly-fitting replacement tooth. A few edges had to be filed down, and the 'bite' had to be adjusted, but after a bit of gluing and a bit of fiddling around I had a nice new tooth - perfectly matched to the colour of my existing teeth. Hopefully it should last at least 15 years - hooray!

Bye bye Patrick

The Brisbane skyline as seen from the Arts complex just across the river from the city centre


Well we spent a lovely weekend in Brisbane - sort of - taking Patrick back up to uni for the start of term. It was my first visit as I was coming back from the UK in February when Patrick started the year up there, and it was left to Michael and Ella to do the honours driving him up with his stuff.

I'm glad I suggested leaving here on the Friday and staying for two nights instead of one, because it's a long way! It was an 850 kilometer round trip i.e. over 10 hours of driving given a) the speed limits and b) the state of the roads... There are a number of choices about how to get up there: you can just take the Pacific Highway (route 1) all the way there, more or less along the coast the whole way, via Grafton (you have to go through Grafton whichever route you choose), or you can head due north from Grafton via Casino and at some point you have to cut across country. Now the Pacific Highway is full of big trucks with big trailers, speeding and sitting on your tail in a dangerous fashion, so we all agreed that once we were through Grafton we'd go via Casino and avoid the worst of the trucks. On the way up on Friday we cut north through the Border Ranges up past Casino, crossing the Queensland Border on the flanks of Mount Lindesay, with the mistaken impression that we were heading for a major freeway in the form of the Lindesay Highway. Ha, ha! As we twisted our way for 70 kms across the mountains on a basic road that wouldn't have been out of place in the Alps (although if the Swiss and/or French were maintaining it I venture that it would have been straighter, wider and in better condition...) we gradually realised that we were on the Lindesay "Highway". Bloody hell. It took over an hour to get across the mountains, at the end of which we'd lost a lot of time and not travelled very far. As Michael says, 'they do things differently in Queensland'. In Brisbane I saw a poster which referred to the 'Department of Main Roads' - maybe it's one person with a desk, slowly overheating in the Queensland summer...?

Oh well. Once we'd got there and overcome our disappointment about the hotel we were staying in (yes, I did book it, but it was cheap...), we enjoyed ourselves. Everyone was very indulgent of me on Saturday, allowing me to spend most of the day in the arts/culture complex across the river that houses the Queensland Centre for Performing Arts (abbreviated to QPAC, apparently), the Queensland State Library (which I shall have to come back and visit again; AMAZING piece of architecture and a fascinating collection!), the Queensland Museum of Art, and the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Sadly I'd missed the Asia-Pacific Triennale which finished at the end of May, but even so the exhibitions were exciting. See my other blog at http://doubleelephant.blogspot.com/ for images! Mind you, it might take me a while to put the pictures up there given how long it takes to upload things here... be patient!




Mad installation art by Katharina Gross!

We had dinner at Gambaro's seafood restaurant on Saturday night, and then finished things off with a dim sum breakfast in the city centre on Sunday morning before dropping Patrick off and starting the long trek home again.

It was strange seeing Patrick in a college environment. I can't say being amongst a bunch of 18/19/20 year olds is an exciting experience: lots of strange clothes, facial hair and non-commital grunts going on - not my cup of tea! When I was at college the men and women on my (mixed) corridor were a fairly sanitary bunch; if they had nasty personal habits I didn't trip over them, and rooms were reasonably tidy and didn't smell... I think a male-only college, certainly in this day and age, is somewhat different. Just goes to show how old I am! Patrick is enjoying it, although he's now decided that he'd like to move out into a shared house next academic year.




Patrick's room at St Leo's College - small but functional!










We'd had a bit of a grumpy week of him being at home. We were all tired after coming back from the UK, and we were getting on each others' nerves quite a lot, so leaving Patrick at St Leo's was a mixture of sadness and relief, I think, for all of us.

Isn't it funny how life changes? For a long time Patrick felt as if he was banging his head against a brick wall living at home, partly because it's hard to see, as a growing adolescent, that anything around you is changing. Perhaps one changes so quickly that everything else seems slow even it life around you is changing too. At least at college, however squalid I might find it, he's free to create his own life - new tattoo and all! I can remember how difficult the moving-away-from-family phase was for me, for different reasons, and I can see how difficult it is for Patrick too. Doubtless we'll all be getting on each others' nerves some more over the coming months... I think it's true to say that Patrick and Michael and I are achieving a new appreciation of each others' good points - from a distance! Being away from home allows you to get rid of the niggles and enjoy the fun bits of weekly telephone calls and tales of your latest exploits, without your parents nagging you about the state of your room/what time you came in last night/how much money you've still got etc.

We'll wait and see what happens next. Patrick needs a job so that he's got some more money and some more independence, and he needs a driving licence too. Quite how he's going to get either of those things will, I guess, become apparent over time - all part of the saga! - but it's exciting for him to think about being in his first shared house! I don't think he realises how much time will be taken up with things he doesn't have to cope with now, such as shopping, cooking and (presumably) cycling into uni for lectures and stuff. Nor does he realise how much money it's going to cost in terms of a larger food bill, internet and phone charges, gas and electricity and rates bills, rent and transport costs. But I guess he'll work it all out, much as we have all had to do. Michael and I had a bit of a flip out about his announcement that he'd like to live out of college next year, partly because it's the exact opposite of what he'd previously said, and partly because we'll now be having nightmares about giving a parental guarantee for the rent on a house full of his ne'er-do-well mates and having to carry the can for them when they're irresponsible with the landlord's things! Maybe it will all be different: it's Patrick's job to find some housemates and organise things, and our job to sign on the dotted line and hand over the cash... with the proviso that he'll be paying us back if it all goes bottom-up!

The person it will affect most, I think, is Ella. If Patrick rents in Brisbane it's inevitable he'll come home less frequently, and so Ella will see even less of him. Despite the fact that they fight and nag each other, they love each other very much and Ella was desolate about having to say goodbye to Patrick yesterday. But what can you do?




Patrick and Ella hamming it up in the cafe at one of the galleries...

Venice

We stayed in the Euganean Hills for 8 days and then spent a couple of nights in Venice before flying to the UK - well, we had to really, it would have been a crime to have flown out of Venice without reacquainting ourselves with La Serenissima.


Michael had a migraine at one point so I took Ella up the Campanile and we looked down over St Mark's






The clock tower restoration has finished! This was the first time I'd seen it out of scaffolding...








As usual we stayed in a little hotel just off St Mark's Square called Antica Casa Coppo, which we found a few years ago when we missed a flight and had to ask at the airport desk if they could find us a hotel... We're obviously creatures of habit because we ate at our favourite restaurants too, Ai Mercanti and Al Conte Pescaor, both of which we've obviously patronised a lot because we were greeted like long-lost family in each place despite the minimum 18-month gap since our last visit!




Ella feeding the pigeons













I can't say that we did anything unusual in Venice; we soaked up the atmosphere and wandered around. This time we went to Burano as well as Murano (where we visited our favourite glass shop, Salviati's, and replaced some of the beautiful cut-glass tumblers that we've broken over the last few years).





The painted houses on Burano





We also took Ella to the Venice Biennale. I was a little anxious about doing this because it isn't always the case that art and 5-year olds mix well, but in fact it was a very successful afternoon. We all enjoyed wandering between the different pavilions, and Ella was entranced by some of the video installations - an art form that usually leaves me cold, so it was interesting to see it through her eyes. I was fascinated to see how she made sense of the images, particularly in installations that didn't include any explanatory sound-track that might give clues to meaning. She sat first with Michael and then with me through a video-loop in the Swiss pavilion, giving a very lucid commentary throughout... I was impressed! You can see what I thought of the art in my other blog, http://doubleelephant.blogspot.com/.





Ella's marble present - a big one - was this mask. I managed to persuade her NOT to go for the pink one!