Author: rr_admin

From the relative calm of Geelong, we arrive in the urban maelstrom that is  Melbourne.

(This entry is brief and at least a week out of date. As usual, finding reliable WiFi in Australia is always difficult. At the moment, we’re reduced to sitting in a McDonald’s in Canberra to leech off of their one hour of free WiFi.)

To navigate these streets is enervating. We are more accustomed to driving in conditions like this:

By accident, we arrive on the day of the Melbourne Cup. This is a big deal here. We toy with the idea of attending, but a deluge of rain on the day puts us off.

Instead, we head for Heide.

This is the former home of John and Sunday Reed, patrons of the arts in the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Probably most well-known for bringing the talents of Sydney Nolan to the world.

Most of Nolan’s famed Ned Kelly series (which we were fortunate enough to see in Perth) were painted at the kitchen table as the Heide circle thrashed out artistic solutions to the world’s problems.

The Reeds and Nolan were engaged in a ménage à trois that was unconventional and, um, interesting, to say the least.

There’s also a wonderful library.

habitué.

The surrounding grounds are now a sculpture park. Signs warn to beware of snakes, especially at this time of year.

We visit the impressive State Library of Victoria.

In keeping with our interest in the Ned Kelly story, we seek out Ned’s famous armour.

The SLV also has the original Jerilderie letter on display.

The weather in Melbourne continues to be cool and wet. Good weather for visiting the State Gallery of Victoria.

Our luck continues, as the Gallery has an exhibit co-featuring Brett Whiteley, whom we first learned about in Sydney.

The other artist is George Baldessin.

But we prefer Brett.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Melbourne

We never free-camp. Often, when people speak of traveling around Australia by camper-van, visions spring up of overnighting on a deserted beach or under the stars alone in the bush. We thought like this as well.

As it turns out, we prefer the luxury of having electricity and proximity to a hot shower. Worth the AUD30 or so, in our opinion.

From the Barossa Valley, we arrive in nearby Adelaide

Poor South Australia often gets missed by overseas visitors – people with time restrictions usually limit themselves to the east coast. This state has so much going for it.

We take a tram out to Glenelg, where there is a beach.

The water is a beautiful blue, but cold at this time of the year.

Yep, South Australia has it all; great seafood, rich wheat-belts, mineral wealth, superb wineries, opals, former nuclear weapon test sites, and a classy state capital.

We visit the National Wine Centre. Explains the history of the ever-more-successful Australian wine industry.

We take a city bus from our caravan park into town every day. Beside the bus stop is a palm tree that doubles as a sort of bird condominium.

We depart for the Victoria border. But not before visiting one last South Australian wine-producing area: McLaren Vale.

We restrict ourselves to a single vineyard, d’Arenberg. We already carry as many bottles of wine as we can reasonably transport. (But we make room for a few more.) The proprietor, Chester Osborn, is quite a character.

This is the visitor centre. It’s ‘different’, as my mother would say. It’s her polite code-word for ‘weird’.

Among its oddities is a smell-o-rama room, where you squeeze bulb horns (mounted on bicycle handlebars) to get a whiff of the distinct aromas to look for in wine.

The urinals in the gents are, um, unique.

It’s wonderfully warm in this part of South Australia.

We arrive in the state of Victoria and follow the Great Ocean Road.

It has pretty coastal scenery, of course.

Parts of the GOR pass though forests that look like Canada.

There are grand views over the white-capped Southern Ocean.

Many remote rock formations.

We stop at the Twelve Apostles. (Spoiler alert – there aren’t actually twelve.) It is very popular, attracting the busloads of visitors that make us uncomfortable.

We hike to the beach below and try to keep warm in the cool drizzle by performing some interpretive dance.

The landscape in Victoria is a far cry from the parched rocks of central Australia in which we’ve spent so much time.

We arrive in Geelong and visit the engaging National Wool Museum.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Adelaide & the Great Ocean Road

Until a few weeks ago. Beginning on the road to Norseman in WA, we start to see snakes both alive and flattened.

This bad boy is a death adder. We can tell by the worm-like tail appendage (hard to see in this photo) that they use to lure their prey.

We hear snakes are appearing now after a winter spent semi-hibernating. Still doesn’t explain why we didn’t see any in the always-steaming North.

From Ceduna, we drive through South Australia down the seafood-rich Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln.

By the way, these locations have nothing to do with ‘Abraham Lincoln’ or ‘Boston, Massachusetts’: they’re named after places in Lincolnshire in the UK.

On the way up the peninsula to Port Augusta, we stop for lunch in village of Cowell, on Franklin Harbour.

According to local info:

‘This area was first seen by Captain Matthew Flinders in HMS ‘Investigator’ in 1802. In 1840, Governor Gawler visited the area from Port Lincoln, and named Franklin Harbour after a midshipman on Mathew Flinders’ vessel – John (later Sir John) Franklin.’

Yes, it’s that Sir John Franklin, so prominent in Canadian history.

At a seaside kiosk, we enjoy tasty fish and chips, with calamari for Maria.

In Port Augusta, Matilda gets a long-awaited bath.

From Port Augusta south, the landscape is more hilly.

We like to stop in small towns and check out the frontier architecture from pioneer days.

North of Adelaide, we spend three nights in the Barossa Valley.

We visit many wineries. Some are international giants, like Jacob’s Creek, Penfolds, and Wolf Blass.

Incidentally, there really is a body of water called ‘Jacob’s Creek’. It’s tiny.

Some are large and well-known in Australia, such as Yalumba, Seppeltsfield, and Kellermeister.

And some are smaller boutique wineries that we find online, such as Two Hands,  Yelland & Papps, Tscharke, and Lou Miranda. These are probably the most fun.

Largely because we’re less likely to find ourselves elbow to elbow with other avid wine-slurpers than at the big-name cellars.

We don’t think we’ve ever seen grapevines this early in the season. Our caravan park has vines growing and we observe how the grapes-to-be are at this point like tiny dewdrops.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Barossa Valley

Well, Adelaide actually. We check into a caravan park near Adelaide and discover there is a koala living nearby.

We’re lucky enough to spot him. He’s darker than his East Coast brothers.

From Pemberton, we make our way to the Nullarbor and points east.

While in Pemberton, we take the Karri Forest Explorer drive.

The woods are full of clematis in bloom.

It’s all very environmentally friendly.

The southwest of Western Australia gets a lot of rainfall. It’s very green. Parts of it even look like England.

We continue down to Albany.

Albany is pleasant city. It was the first capital of Western Australia, briefly.

Due to its location, it was the departure point for the fleets of ANZACs sailing off to the First World War. So their last sight of home for years.

This is detailed in the National ANZAC Centre, an exceptionally brilliant interactive museum. Tells the stories of those who left and came back, or came back greatly changed, or never came back at all.

Among the exhibits is this touching sculpture of an ANZAC sharing a hatful of water with his horse.

Like many places of interest that we’ve been to relating to 20th-century wars, it’s full of old people. Apparently, younger people are not interested in past conflicts and assume our present era of peace and plenty lasts forever. Hope they’re right.

There are other things to see on the hill.

For example, the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial. This was originally in Egypt.

The Lonely Planet guide euphemistically says:

‘The memorial was originally erected in Port Said, Egypt. However, it
was irreparably damaged during the Suez crisis in 1956, and this copy was made from masonry salvaged from the original. ‘

When I read this, I immediately imagine by ‘irreparably damaged’, they mean ‘mindlessly torn to pieces in an orgy of destruction by a rabid mob of felaheen whipped into an anti-Western frenzy by Nasser’.

Of course, a bit of digging and it turns to be the case, as stated here.

Albany is also the home of Australia’s last whaling factory. The site is now the Historic Whaling Station.

Silos on the harbourfront sport a cool seadragon mural.

the first ship sent from Sydney to establish Albany.

From Albany we drive to Esperance. When I was here in 1980, the local museum featured chunks of Skylab. They’re still here.

At the time, I stayed in the local hostel. It’s still here too.

We begin our drive across the Nullarbor.

We have three stopovers along the way; Balladonia, Eucla, and Ceduna.

It’s famed for being very desolate, but we’ve been through a lot of desolate places on this trip.

We come to the Great Australian Bight.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Pemberton to the Nullarbor

Matilda needs a new battery as we approach Albany. At the battery shop, the owner’s vintage wheels are outside. I try to convince Maria that our next car should be something similar.

Before moving on to Margaret River – our next destination – we enjoy an extended stay in Perth. We do big-city things; renew prescriptions, I get a haircut and new lenses for my glasses, pick up mail, buy new shoes.

We revisit Fremantle to see the Shipwrecks Museum.

Below is the surviving timbers from the Batavia, shipwrecked in 1629 off the coast of Western Australia. This is only a small portion of the original hull.

In the background is a stone portico that was carried as ballast and meant for the walls of the Dutch city Batavia (now Jakarta) in present-day Indonesia.

If you like shipwrecks – and who doesn’t? – you can spend hours here.

We eventually set off for Margaret River. In case you don’t know, MR is a well-known wine-producing area.

We visit, hmmm, let’s see, Robert Oatley, Credaro, Pierro, Vasse Felix, Cape Mentelle, Leeuwin Estate, and Voyager Estate.

There are over 200 wineries in the region.

Vasse Felix is the oldest estate in Margaret River.

Another winery has an interesting chandelier made from wine glasses.

Back in our caravan park, there are many ringneck parrots strutting around .

There’s something uplifting and heartwarming about seeing parrots everywhere. It’s like being in a sort of primeval Eden. This effect is helped by the lush bottle-brush trees surrounding our campsite.

We drive south into forests of enormous karri trees and arrive in Pemberton.

We pass a bucolic scene of sheep feeding placidly among some olive trees.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Margaret River

One of the wineries has a cool fountain with lifelike statues of cockatoos.

It is actually a memorial to Steve Irwin. He was killed by the same kind of creature that stung Maria in Flores.

From Carnarvon, we continue to travel down the west coast to Perth.

On the road to Kalbarri, we come across an echidna – the first we’ve seen in the wild.

He waddles into his burrow to escape Maria’s photographic harassment.

Kalbarri looks wonderful, but there is no place to be had in any caravan park. It turns out to be a school holiday of some kind. We carry on to the next town, Port Gregory, with its strikingly pink lake.

As we get further south, we see broad fields of wheat. This is a welcome surprise, after seeing little but rocks, dry scrubby bush, and spinifex grasses for a few thousand kilometers.

We wonder how they keep the kangaroos out.

Geraldton is a pleasant small city. It has a port from which a lot of the surrounding grain gets exported.

Geraldton has a moving monument to the men of the HMAS Sydney II, a warship lost with all hands in 1941.

Geraldton is also the home of the Museum of Geraldton. Like most of the museums we visit here, it is nearly new and excellent. Among the exhibits is a 3D film about the discovery of the Sydney II on the ocean floor in 2008, as well as the German ship HSK Kormoran; both ships sank in the engagement. The wrecks lie in 2,500 metres of water, 20km apart, about 200km west of Shark Bay.

The soundtrack is Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, which is so achingly apt for the film it almost hurts.

We stay on Sunset Beach.

It’s nice.

We walk around town, but the streets are nearly deserted. The National Rugby League Grand Finals are on, and a large part of the Australian population is glued to a TV screen. This phenomenon always puts me in mind of Lynn Miles’s ‘Hockey Night in Canada‘. If you don’t share the mania for the national sport, prepare to feel a little alienated.

We head down the scenic ocean route to Perth.

Near the town of Lancelin are enormous white sand dunes that look like snow.

Or sugar.

We arrive in the bright lights of Perth. Similar to our trip to Sydney, it takes some adjusting to be back in urban Australia again.

We make a day trip to nearby Rottnest Island.

Rottnest is the home of thousands of quokkas, which are as cute as all get-out.

It’s also the home of large King’s skinks.

Here, a skink and a quokka meet face to face.

Quokkas are endearingly unafraid of people. They browse contentedly on the grass and tend to ignore humans.

We rent bicycles and tour the island.

There are signs that say ‘Don’t touch or feed the wildlife’. However, I can’t resist a quick illicit petting.

Another day, we visit nearby Fremantle.

Our main destination is the wonderful Western Australia Maritime Museum.

A star attraction of the museum is its submarine tour.

Our guide, Keith, is a retired submariner. He served on this very boat (a sub is always a ‘boat’, and not a ‘ship’ apparently), HMAS Ovens, for 11 months, during his career.

There’s a world of difference between listening to a barely-motivated guide and one that has actually served in submarines for 20 years. Especially one with an Australian sense of humour and typical Aussie casualness to authority.

We learn that everyone on board is familiar with all the sub’s systems. To the point where many tasks can be done in complete darkness.

We also visit the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In another manifestation of serendipity, there is an exhibit of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series.

I recently finish Peter Carey’s ‘True History of the Kelly Gang‘, so coming across this is timely.

I react to one painting in particular much as I did to the Elioth Gruner work in Sydney.

It’s ‘The Butterfly’, by Freda Robertshaw.

There’s just something about this one that grabs me.

Sight or  Insight of the Day  – West coast to Perth

A few days ago was October 3. It’s our one-year anniversary of leaving Ottawa.

In one of those odd coincidences, the day we realized it was the third of October, I was wearing exactly the same clothes as in this photo.

Who knows what adventures lie ahead?

We continue our northwestern journey from Exmouth to Carnarvon.

We like Exmouth and the surrounding area a lot. From atop Vlamingh Head, we watch whales spouting offshore.

Exmouth’s most famous feature is its array of antennae,  originally built to communicate with submarines and ships in the Indian Ocean.

Apparently this is done by satellites now, but this array is still in use by the Australian navy.

At the entrance to the Harold E. Holt base is the prow of a submarine with the hump on the front where the sonar equipment resides.

Virtually nothing existed here before the sixties. The United States built the town from scratch to support the base.

Exmouth is also famous for its whale sharks.

In the season – March to August – you can swim with them, if you’re so inclined. It’s gonna cost you, though.

Instead of defense folks, Exmouth is now a popular place for retired Aussies to move to.

In front of the impressive Ningaloo Visitors Centre are these interesting planters. In its military heyday, armour-piercing rounds are fired at centimeters-thick steel plate in nearby training grounds. These are now recycled into civic furniture.

Nearby are the stunning Ningaloo Coast and Cape Range National Park.

This is the kind of snorkeling we like: step off the beach into the bay and you are immediately surrounded by coral and thousands of insanely colourful fish.

There are shipwrecks galore along this coast.

You don’t have to go far to get away from it all.

We go to the end of Cape Range National Park and hike the Yardie Creek gorge.

It’s OK, but too crowded for us.

Driving down to Carnarvon, we come across a mamma emu and her young one crossing the highway.

We stop for lunch at the Overlander roadhouse.

Maria likes these flowers against the dusty red dirt.

Our first stop in Carnarvon is the Space and Technology Museum.

Carnarvon is a long-time space tracking station.

Sight ot Insight of the Day – Exmouth to Carnarvon

At the Yardie Creek gorge parking lot, we see this cool world-traveling van from Switzerland.

If we didn’t have Matilda, it would be the perfect size vehicle for us.

As they often are, an itinerary is displayed. These people take a very interesting route to get here.

There are a lot of places with heart-attack-inducing driving conditions on this map. Our hats go off to the travelers.

After the fleshpots of Sydney, we are happy to be back in the outback again.

The northwest of Australia is known for its picturesque bottle trees. Essentially  baobabs, like in Africa.

The endless vistas and empty roads suit us down to the ground.

After returning from Sydney, we spend a last evening with Lauretta at Darwin’s  Deck Chair Cinema. While lounging on beanbags at the front, one of the DCC’s famous possums casually strolls over Lauretta’s pillow and finishes off her dish of Middle Eastern salad – mere centimetres away – with the aplomb and casualness of a house cat.

We stop at Victoria River, NT overnight before arriving in the state of Western Australia the next day. One of the first roadhouses we come to has a chute for disposing of live cane toads, a real pest here.

We flee Hall’s Creek early in the morning of my birthday after – barely – escaping the predations of larcenous locals around the caravan park. We stop for breakfast at a roadside halt that is covered with corella parrots.

We never tire of seeing parrots everywhere here; we’re such tourists. There’s something uplifting about parrots.

We arrive in Broome, WA, a relaxed sort of town.

After learning about local history at the Broome Museum – the pearl industry, dinosaur footprints, and aircraft relics from WWII Japanese air raids – we head to Cable Beach.

The next day, we spend an unexpected night at the Roebuck Plains roadhouse caravan park when the road south to Port Hedland is closed because of a bushfire.

Eventually, we carry on to Eighty Mile Beach.

Like the beaches of Broome, the waters of Eighty Mile Beach are a lovely turquoise.

I recall stopping at this pub my previous time in Australia. I got a multi-day lift with someone named Risto (a Finnish name). He worked at the Goldsworthy iron ore mine. He drove a green VW 1600 fastback. It never ceases to amaze how the brain retains such trivia when sometimes I can’t remember which day of the week it is.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Back in the Outback

We see a shark. Close up.

Just when we are finally reveling in the the tropical heat of Darwin, it’s time for an 11-day Sydney interlude. We reluctantly leave Matilda in the long-term parking at Darwin airport and fly across the country to the still-wintry urban frenzy of Sydney. Our niece, Julia, is visiting from Canada.

We look forward to seeing Julia again. After she spends a few days in Hong Kong and Macao, we arrange to meet in Sydney. Julia is always good at scouting out excellent Airbnb properties. This time is no exception – we move into a quaint renovated old home in the gentrified neighbourhood of Pyrmount.

Maria and Julia go out on the town.

The Sydney Fish Market is a few minutes walk from our place.

Julia really, really wants to interact with some koalas. We attend a ‘breakfast with the koalas’ event at Wild Life Sydney Zoo.

There are lots of koalas. They’re all predictably adorable. You just want to squish them. But no touching allowed.

I can cross ‘pet a wombat’ off my bucket list.

Julia and I clown around at the wombat enclosure.

Fun fact: wombat dung is cube-shaped.

Julia and a wallaby share highlighting secrets.

We rent a car and drive to the viniferous Hunter Valley. We visit half a dozen wineries by bike.

Back in Sydney, we decide to eat in one evening for a change. Maria prepares some kangaroo steaks.

One night, we go to the Sydney Opera House to see…an opera! Rossini’s The Turk in Italy, with the setting delightfully transposed to 1950’s Italy.

Everyone has a good time. This production is very colourful.

On another day, we rent a car and go for an overnight trip to the Blue Mountains.

Julia finds us a four-bedroom house in Katoomba on Airbnb. It’s a bargain at 94 AUD per night.

Next day, we walk the misty Jamison Valley at the foot of the Three Sisters.

Back in Sydney the next day just in time to see a pop-up Globe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Unlike the real reconstructed Globe in London – which we have had the good fortune to attend – this one is not permanent. Hence, pop-up.

It’s a New Zealand troupe performing. Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ are dressed as tradies (Australian for ‘tradespersons’). The fairies are Maori warriors, delivering most of their lines in Maori.

It is hilarious. Just like 400 years ago.

Maria and Julia spend an afternoon at Bondi Beach while I stay home and binge on Netflix movies.

That evening, we meet at a Malaysian restaurant and walk home.

Maria and Julia surprise me one night with a slightly early birthday celebration.

We visit the Museum of Contemporary Arts. We see a retrospective of works  by John Mawurndjul.

All are on bark.

All have unbelievably fine cross-hatching work that we learn is known as ‘rarrk‘. Try using that in your next game of Scrabble.

Alas, the day arrives when Julia flies home. We really enjoy spending time with her.

The next day – our last in Sydney for now – is sunny and warm, the first Spring-like day so far here.

It’s been fun, Sydney, but we’ll be happy to get back to the wide open spaces again.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Sydney interlude

We mention several times that one thing we enjoy about traveling is discovering new things. This happens again when we re-visit the Museum of Sydney. There is a wonderful temporary exhibit: Bohemian Harbour; Artists of Lavender Bay‘.

Chief among these is Brett Whiteley, well-known in Australia but a new name for us.

We spend our last morning visiting his studio in the neighbourhood of Surry Hills.

The lower level contains one of his masterworks, the multi-panel piece ‘Alchemy‘.

The upper level is much as he left it. A nice touch is the music playing throughout the studio, selections from Whiteley’s collection. Most of it is familiar from my own music-listening era.

I flip through his CDs and LPs. One album makes me look twice – the Dire Straits live album ‘Alchemy’.

Sure enough, the cover art is the work ‘Alchemy’ that we just examined downstairs.

Heroin was Whiteley’s eventual downfall. This work of his sums up nicely what heroin can do to your sense of perception.

In the afternoon, we visit Lavender Bay itself.

It’s definitely not cheap any more. Sydney suffers from the same pathologically overinflated real estate prices as Toronto and Vancouver, for much the same reasons.

Whiteley’s ex-wife Wendy still lives at 1 Walker Street. She has spent a quarter century building a beautiful garden – open to all – below her house.

Now, where did we leave off? Oh yes, in Kakadu National Park, on our way to Darwin.

We see more rock art and stunning formations at Ubirr.

It’s a short drive up to Darwin.

Darwin, like other places I remember, is much less of a frontier town than it used to be.

We visit the Flying Doctor museum.

These days, the majority of its fleet of aircraft are Pilatus, of Swiss manufacture.

Stoke’s Hill Wharf is a popular place to hang out.

I look forward to reaching Darwin to reconnect with an old friend, Lauretta. I first met Lauretta on a kibbutz in Israel. She was influential in my decision to visit Australia many years ago. A few years later, she convinced me to go to Africa for the first time, where she worked as a teacher in Selebe Phikwe, Botswana.

Lauretta – originally from Sydney –  is now a long-time resident of Darwin. She owns and manages a very successful shop selling aboriginal art and used books.

One reason for its success, I’m sure, is that Lauretta is very simpatico with aboriginal people. (She’s always had this gift, which is probably why she’s been comfortable living in remote places for much of her life.)

We go for dinner and watch the sundown on Stoke’s Hill Wharf.

At Mindil Beach, there’s a popular sundown market twice a week.

Lauretta has a regular stall here as well. We stand amazed at how busy Lauretta’s stall is. At one point, the transactions are non-stop. Still, she makes time to socialize.

Hundreds gather to watch the sun go down.

When in Rome…

The prize exhibit is a B-52 bomber, one of the few on display outside of the United States.

‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons…’
– Leonard Cohen

It takes up most of the interior. It is gigantic.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Darwin

Lauretta mentions that she has a friend nearby with a wallaby joey in her care. This we have to see.

Lauretta’s friend brings him out nestled in a cloth pouch, where he spends most of his time.

His mother was struck and killed by a car. Someone checked the mother’s pouch and Freddy was still alive inside.

Lauretta’s friend is a certified wildlife carer, not an eccentric amateur animal rescuer. Still, she admits it’ll be hard to pass him on to the next phase of rehabilitation back to the wild.

He is unbelievably cute. We spend ten or fifteen minutes fussing over him, which he clearly likes.