Sunday, November 21, 2010

Seasoning

So the barbecue has blissfully been engaged on several occasions now, and the shorts and thongs seem to be de rigueur. The garden is still a mess, but the things that count (i.e. BBQ area, table, shady tree and piece of grass) seem to be pleasant enough. It’s taken a little while, with days akin to April showers (just ten degrees warmer), and a ragbag of upper level troughs and cool changes. And in that paragraph I encapsulate the Anglo-Aussie me, talking about the weather conditions for a BBQ in my shorts and thongs. The Anglo-Aussie me is also significantly hairier, which is saying something, but my follicles seem to be bursting forth like the long grass and weeds at this time of year.

OK, shall we talk about the weather then? There have been showers and storms and dramatic skies, captured one night at Red Hill as the lightning forks zinged their way across the land. There have been clouds and winds, but, in the last week things have settled down and there have been steaks and sunsets, shorts and thongs.







This weekend was one of those beautiful Canberra weekends, so what do I do? Get out of Canberra for a bit, driving an hour and a half, via the very strategically placed and welcoming Goulburn Bakery, for a wee walk in the woods. Bungonia Gorge is home to bush and more bush and some scrubby bush land, some of which plummets down to the Shoalhaven River and Slot Canyon. You can walk down there and through the canyon, but that’s for the energetic and companioned. I stuck to the relatively minor ups and downs of the Green trail.





I wasn’t totally on my own, occasionally scaring poor souls with my psycho killer moustache bushwalker look. And then there were the two giant lizards I saw in separate spots. I really dig the way lizards move, they’re pretty cool creatures I reckon, and generally, as far as I can tell, non toxic unlike most other critters around here. Oh, hang on, I did see some toxic lizards earlier in the week, feeding away after Parliament had closed for the day.

So in my Anglo-Aussie way I’m going to bid you tally ho dear maaaaaate. Like the sporting calendar around here, things are set to pick up over the next few weeks, as we head towards that surreal shorts-filled Pavlova and mango fest that is Christmas. I’m really quite looking forward to it!

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Muck a l'orange


Back in Australian time not a lot seems to have happened of note. Julia is still holding on, the cricket team is still losing (hehe), and the relentless pursuit of a life dedicated to shorts and barbeques continues apace. The one big change is in the world around me, which was barely more than bare when I went overseas to one which is now flourishing green in e very direction. Unfortunately this applies to weeds and all, which are competing for attention with the newly planted herbs in the backyard. Perfect for numerous spiders and potential snakes.

I may open up my garden as an extension to the Australian National Botanic Gardens, displaying every single type of overgrown weed and bush that you won’t see at the verdant and diligently manicured sister site. Here, a little walk before a big thunderstorm thrust me back into the world of spring, a nice break in between jetlag recovery and catching up.





Back a week, I was on the road again travelling to experience further botanical highlights of the inland in between work needs. Mildura, situated 500 kms north west of Melbourne, 450 kms north east of Adelaide and 1000 kms west of Sydney is, it is fair to say, a long way from anywhere. With this comes its own self sufficiency, a regional centre supplying McDonalds and adult entertainment for miles around. It has its own brewery and celebrity chef, Stefano, but most of all, it has the Murray River.

Here, the Murray is substitute for the sea, the lifeblood for the area, giver of brownish water and irrigation for crops... thousand upon thousand of grape vine, orange groves, veggie patches and seasonal worker. Venture outside of irrigation land and its fruit fly free zone and really we are talking about outback here: arid and harsh and dusty, signature red sand emerging through the gnarled gums and shrubs of the interior visible at Hattah Kulkyne National Park.









The Murray, and its companion Darling, is so important to life out here and to the wellbeing of Australia in general that its never much out of the news. State shenanigans over water allocations come with the territory, and Mildura, Victoria is just across the water from New South Wales, while South Australia is an hour or so west. In New South Wales, the border town of Wentworth is a significant place, at the confluence of the Murray and the Darling rivers, a favourite spot for getting all punned up Blackadder style: clearly it’s the Murray, Darling. Such a landmark is, for once in Australia, understated, and it takes some persistent trekking through scrub and giant grass and reeds to reach.



Wentworth is branded the gateway to the outback, and you sure get a good taste of this just 10 minutes out of town. Perry Sandhills present an entirely different world, a world that spreads from here thousands of miles north and west, a world which awaits discovery, a world that prompts Wentworth to kindly request drivers dump their dust before entering the town streets. A strangely enticing world encouraging you to become consumed in its vastness. But there are other attractions pulling you back...





And so from orange land to Orange World, a celebration of all things oranges on the way back to Mildura. One of those only in Australia places where some enterprising farmer has decided to share his love of citrus, assemble a few wonderfully kitsch artefacts and impress us all with his freshly squeezed juice.



And just how can you beat a smiley orange? Yes, Mildura and environs truly is a splendid world all of its own making.