Of Course They Did

It was the Townsville Amateurs race day last weekend but sadly, because of the Equine Flu, no horses were allowed to attend. But get this: 4500 people got dressed up in their fancy gear - dresses, hats, suits and loud ties - and went down to the race track anyway.

The Townsville Bully's full report is here: Guests of honour didn’t attend, but the party went on regardless.

By all accounts those 4500 people had a good day wandering around the empty track drinking champagne in the sun, although as one attendee put it: "It was a funny feeling, hard to describe I suppose. It wasn't the buzz of previous years.” Yeah, I know that feeling, like when something is missing but you just can't put your finger on what it is..?

I think we can conclude from this that it’s probably worth keeping the horses involved in future.

Has anybody told the Melbourne Cup? Because I think they'll need to know.

On the Beach

Since Hayden got some consultants in to help him at work, he’s learnt himself a new phrase: On the beach. “The beach” is where consultants go for a good rest between assignments, or they might nip out to “the beach” for an afternoon if they have been up til 3am on a deadline the night before. I have never seen these consultants in action, but I imagine them to be something like stockbrokers from the 1980s: tall, tanned, Sydney-looking fellows dressed in crisp business shirts and a level of grooming unheard of in Townsville. I picture them drawling out of the corners of their mouths, “Why’d I miss that meeting? Oh yeah, [nodding slowly] I was ‘on the beach’ that day, heh-heh..” OK, so that is not an attractive image (think American Psycho), and “on the beach” is not even a very amusing piece of lingo but I still wanted to note it down cos, as I’ve mentioned before, I do like to collect a bit of workplace slang (example A, and example B).

This week I started a new job at a café just down the road, and I am hoping it will balance nicely with the next round of writing work - which should be coming up soon. It surprised me how lonely I got working on those articles at home by myself. Like, way lonelier than if I was just at home by myself doing my own stuff, even though when I’m working I’m emailing, texting, talking on the phone a lot more than I would otherwise do. I’m hoping that working in the café will be a good antidote to that.

Since I’m not rostered on at the café today and I haven’t yet received my brief for the writing work, it occurred to me that today I must be, legitimately, ‘on the beach’. And because I can’t stay actually on the beach too long (summer’s coming back, I get sunburned if I stay after 9:30am), I decided to spend my beach day doing something else entirely:

This fish mould has been sitting in the back of our pantry ever since my mum passed it on to me from her aunt Marjorie. It came with a hand-written recipe for salmon mousse, which whenever I see I think to myself: “I’m going to try that out one day.”

Today is that day.

I don’t know what I expect it to taste like. I have this weird attraction sometimes, to the most cheap and kitschy food available (Drue, do you remember that time I made you have a $5 fry-up in sleazy Spencer Street with me, in the belief that it would make a deliciously fun and kitschy preparation for a night of drinking? Yeah, I don’t know why I did that to you. I’m sorry).

The Salmon Mousse recipe calls for onion, gelatine, cream, and two lots of tinned salmon.

(Doesn’t this picture remind you of food shopping on a budget in, say, France? All these unfamiliar things in little tins and jars, no fibre in sight and the only thing fresh is an onion?)

Bung it all together, and viola! An extremely unhappy-looking fish.



And now to serve ...

and to taste ...

"Eugggh!"

And he's off! racing to the bathroom.

Was my day on the beach wasted?

I think not!

But what to do with the rest of the fish?

I suppose I'll have to freeze it til bin day.

What I'm laughing at today:

My sister's report of her birthday:

"And then, Nick [her partner who's of Croatian descent] cooked me a chocolate cake. Someone at his work had brought it in, and he thought it was the best cake ever so he got the recipe. I think it's surprising that a chemist can't follow a recipe, but he's just incapable of it. He tried really hard ... except his egg whites didn't beat up so good because he didn't clean the beaters after making the chocolate mix, and he had to change all of the amounts since we didn't buy enough chocolate. In the end it was really good - surprisingly good seeing as he realised (after putting the cake in the oven) that he'd forgotten the flour."

and the ensuing email conversation:

Me: that's hilarious. Do you mind if I put it on my blog?

Her: No ... just don't include his surname, so when his potential chemist bosses google him they won't find out that he can't cook. Is it paranoid to think like that?

Me: No, it isn't. But anyway Nick's safe because I don't know how to spell his surname. It's something like Knrkjn isn't it?

Her: there's a z in it too

Snaaaaaaake!

The reason why I wanted to walk up Castle Hill yesterday afternoon was to test my theory that from the top, looking west down into the Townsville badlands, it looks just like Springfield (from up on that hill where Lisa took Nelson for a picnic that time she had a crush on him and dressed him up in nerd clothes. Minus the nuclear power station).

After taking that photo, Hayden and I started to walk back down the hill along a different path. Halfway down we came to a crossroads, where we met a large-ish lady in a bright pink top who was hopping from foot to foot like a kid who needs to pee. She looked really anxious, so we slowed down to check that she was all right – it’s not usual for people to stop halfway up or down Castle Hill. It’s one of those hills that people walk (or run if they’re nutcases) straight up then straight back down again. (In times past, people would to go up there in order to wait around and meet up with other people with similarly dodgy interests … but now they’ve got security cameras pointing in every direction so that doesn’t go on so much any more. It’s really just a fitness hill now.)

When the large pink lady saw that we were heading toward the left fork in the path, her expression melted into relief and she blurted: “Oh thank god you’re going that way. I’ll walk with you. There’s a python down the other way.” She took a step down the path before us but then hesitated again, presumably because it comes out at the bottom in a completely different suburb.

Meanwhile, at the mention of the word “python”, Hayden’s eyes had lit up and he had begun springing on the balls of his feet as if to say “Can we? Can we?” because he’s been waiting and waiting for his first chance to see a live Australian snake. I suggested he go on and have a look for it while I waited at the crossroads - I was assuming that by that time the snake would be long gone. Hayden wasn’t deterred by my indifference. He bounded off down the path towards the snake (seriously, hasn't he heard about how snakes respond to vibrations in the ground?). The pink lady continued to hesitate … then finally walked off after Hayden. I suppose she thought that he could offer protection.

After she went, I decided to follow her down that path too. I wanted to see what happened. Also, I thought that the pink lady might be glad of some company, as she still seemed fairly freaked out. When I caught up to her on the path she told me about how she’s used to snakes cos she lives on the edge of town near the bush and she sees them all the time in her yard. She still had a tremor in her voice. She kept repeating that this one was only a python so there was "really no need to worry because they don’t usually strike.” I hate hearing that, like when you don’t want to swim in the river because of crocodiles and someone always says “But they’re only fresh-water crocs.” That is not the point.

Eventually, the pink lady and I caught up to Hayden. He’d found the snake, which had hid itself (mostly) under a big rock and he was taking this photo of the its tail peeking out.

The pink lady’s anxiety regrouped. She halted about five metres from where Hayden was standing near the snake, and I pulled up behind her. She called to Hayden in a high, tight voice: “Is it safe??” and Hayden called back, and remember this is the first time he’s seen a real live snake, “Yeah, it’s fine.” (Hayden is incapable of answering in the negative. My dad took him sailing two Christmases ago, and before they left the shore he asked Hayden “Can you sail?” Hayden answered yes and by the end of the day the boat was upside down and they were both in the drink.) Anyway, the question was irrelevant because there was no way the big pink lady was ready to actually walk past Hayden within striking range of the snake.

While we were all standing around, another guy came up behind us. He must have been a local cos he was unsurprised to hear about the snake. He wasn’t scared at all, either. As he said, “it’s only a python. They don’t tend to strike.” He made to walk past us all on the track when the pink lady said “Uh-uh-uh, you’re not going ahead of me!” and she shot past us and the snake and sped off down the path without looking back. Here’s a blurred picture of her taking off:

She didn’t reply to our farewells. The other guy just shrugged and walked on, and that was that. Hayden and I took a few more photos and then walked home cos it was starting to get dark.

We’ve seen roos on the golf course, whales off the starboard bow when we were in the Whitsundays and now Hayden’s finally seen a snake (when I was at Century Mine I saw a hawk fly down and pick up a snake off the road in front of me, so I already had snake on my list). But we still haven’t seen a crocodile in the wild, either fresh or saltwater one, or a big sea-going turtle or a cassowary. There are many things left for us to do in Townsville.

Update: We've now seen some sea-turtles as well! We were down at the beach yesterday, the day after a rainy day and the water was really clear and we saw a whole batch of turtles swimming around the headland.

Cu-Cu Catchoo

The Townsville Jazz Festival was on Sunday.

Hayden and I tried to look cool while we watched, but the bar we were in kept filling up with Mums and Dads and their really little kids. They ruined our buzz. We had to leave when a two year old took control of her own stroller and started pushing it round and round our table while she improvised a little song of her own. So unhip.

Shivers

I’ve been flat as a tack recently. Morose, especially around the house all day long by myself. I’ve been waiting to find out whether I’ve got more writing work coming or if I need to go and look for some myself, and in the meantime I’ve been …bored.

But today something happened to take my mind off things. Some men arrived to pull down the big old tree that has been shading the carpark of our block of flats, probably since before the flats were built. It was a good tree, and it did a really good job of shading the searing hot hurty gravel of the carpark, through which you have to scamper on tip-toes on your way to the pool in summer. However, Corporate Services said that it had to go. So it had to.

Corporate Services didn’t give us any warning that this was going to happen. The first I heard about it was when a bush-ranger-looking guy knocked on our door to see if I knew who owned the cars that were parked under the tree out the back. I said: “Sorry mate, can’t 'elp ya,” in my flattest Townsville accent, so that he’d know I really meant it, and was about to close the door when he added “Cos we’re cutting down the tree today.”

And at that point I thought I might go and have a look at what was going on. I have spent a bit of time trying to stop this kind of thing from happening, after all. I changed out of my jarmies, and when I got out to the carpark it was clear that the fellers had had no luck finding out whose cars they were - they were on their way to removing one of them with a tiny loader.

One of the fellers must also be wanted in another state, because he jumped clear of my photo with alacrity. The guy who'd ripped the arms out of his work shirt and was wearing it with footy shorts told me that if I caught the other guy on film, he’d break my camera. Riiiiiightio.















The original bush-ranger looking guy backed down the drive with the offending car in tow.

Then he "parked" it in the street with the other abandoned vehicles before getting on with the business of chopping down the tree. Note the grass growing up under that classic black Holden ute - it's been there a long long time. In this shot you can also see the number plate of the car from our place, in case you recognise it and want to know what's happened to it. Also, see those two takeaway coffees on the dash? They've been there for at least a year.

The actual tree-removal was very quick in the end.
Before:



And 15 minutes after:


















Let the long hot shadeless summer begin!

Pears

Yesterday I found myself browsing on Paris Breakfasts, a blog of Paris and watercolours, who mentioned Chardin and got me thinking about still life pictures. Later on last night, I bought these pears in Bilo - they're beautiful and if I was going to make a still life picture I would paint them.

Instead they were gonna be another exciting lunch ... but I was snacking on biccies while I was admiring them, and now I'm not hungry any more. Oh well, maybe pears for dinner?

Afternoon Walking

When I lived in a big city, I was never without membership to a gym, where I would go at the end (always the end) of each long day in order to empty my mind while cycling/walking/climbing stairs to pop music videos. If I ever skipped a couple of days, I'd get a sort of craving for pop music .. and I'd know that it was time to go to the gym.

In Townsville, gym membership is unusally expensive and there's no incentive to join because there are so many excellent places to go for an afternoon walk. And the wide open spaces are just as good as pop music for filling my head up with nuttin.

My new favourite spot for a walk is the wetlands reserve just behind Townsville. It's beautiful, and just up the road from our place. I don't know why I never went before this weekend?

The flat open space and the rumply hills in the background remind me of the savannah country around the mine where I worked last year. Somewhat ironically, the country around that mine was I think the least damaged landscape I've ever seen - I suppose that I will ever see. I didn't have too many words for it then (didn't have too many words for anything) but at the time it seemed amazingly rich to me and incredibly beautiful.

The Townsville wetlands can't match the gulf savannah for prinstinity, but they definitely have that same theraputic quality - the exercise, the fresh air, and my head full of nothing at the end of the day.

Savoury Treat

This morning I received word that my writing job is very nearly complete (just waiting for final-final-final sign-off).


I decided to celebrate by making myself an extravagent lunch: a hamburger of my own devising (cream cheese, roast sweet potato, bok choy and fried mushrooms, topped with Hayden's roast capsicum relish). Delicious.

Although it did fall apart the moment I tried to take a bite. Not to worry.

Question: What do I usually have for lunch?
Answer: I have absolutely no idea.

Innisfail Rocks Out

The original inhabitants of the wildly beautiful Johnstone Shire told their particular musical stories with the aid of clap sticks. Eons later the sound of castinets and Spanish hand clapping would ring through the rainforests and cane fields to tell another fascinating story.

In 2007, the journey between the two tales will be captured in this original outdoor music theatre piece by internationally-renowned musician and composer John Rodgers with song and dance from indigenous and Spanish performers and a visual journey through times of dynamic cultural and ecological change.

The promo blurb for this concert put in my mind the expectation of a much more swirling, abstract sound-scape piece of performance art incorporating "eons" and "visual journeys" and "clap sticks". Knowing the work of composer John Rodgers a little, I expected this to be achieved in a complex and interesting way, but I was wondering how on earth he was going to communicate it in a manner which the good folk of Innisfail could connect with.

Well. When we arrived at the venue, I immediately grasped how he'd managed that: the place was swarming with little girls all dressed up in spanish-doll dancing costumes. The audience was made up principally of these girls' mothers, and as we sat down we could hear them discussing the technicalities of sewing up the costumes.

The concert itself was much less abstract than I expected, and much less about indigenous culture than the program had advertised. It was the story, told with music including some really beautiful flamenco guitar, old Spanish songs and a bit of Spanish-style dancing from the girls, of two men from Spain who lived in Innisfail in the first half of the twentieth century.


One of the men was the architect and builder of this place: Paronella Park. It was to be his Spanish Castle and pleasure garden, but abandoned since his death in 1940-something, it has become North Queensland's answer to Angkor Wat in terms of beautiful ruins rotting in the midst of jungle. The other Spanish man was a master of flemenco guitar, a passionate gambler, and a fisherman who spent much time in his later years just sitting on the pier at Palm Cove trying to catch Spanish mackerel. This man had taught John Rodgers to play flamenco guitar back in the 1970s.


It was a great concert, on the whole. Even though the audience was restless all around us during the long sections when their daughters weren't on stage, it was still really wonderful to hear good musicians performing complex and beautiful music, and doing it really well. And the didgeridoo player, the sole "indigenous performer", added an amazing bass sound to some of the keening lovelorn Spanish ballads. The rest of the time though, he didn't have much to do. I did see him close his eyes through one of the big flamenco set-pieces: I'm not sure if he was listening really really closely or if he was just having a snooze.

I'm not sure why they tried to sell the concert the way that they did. It clearly didn't help the audience relate to what was going on on stage. Perhaps that's what the concert organisers had to do in order to get the Government funding stamp of approval? It's not that I mind, I'm really glad that they were able to bring the concert up to North Queensland - it's the sort of thing that we never ever get to see here.


PS: I have to say thank you so much to Hayden, who yet again showed how good he is to me by driving me all the way there and back (about seven hours driving in total). I'm glad I was able to make it easier for him by reading Harry Potter out loud the whole way.

End of the Week

It's the end of the first working week I've had in a while. I've been working on the publication of the little writing job I've been doing for a while now. Writing the thing is no bother at all - I just sit at home in my jarmies, tap tap tapping on my computer. But trying to get it into print has been a miniature nightmare. Mostly it's the waiting I hate - I send my little stories out into the world and then wait wait wait for someone to tell me if they're good enough ... or not.

But now the sun's going down on the last part of a Friday afternoon. I'm going to rest on the weekend.

Hope you have a good one too.

Exciting Delivery No. 2

Even though our delivery lady is a surly cow who, no matter how many times she comes to our place always drives around the back and then complains when it takes me five whole minutes to get to her rather than as I suggest come to the front door which is always wide open and will take me no time at all, it's still always exciting to get a package delivery. Recently I have been taking advantage of the extraordinary exchange rate to buy things off Amazon.com, and the first of them arrived today. (Yay!)

I chose this book, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, on the recommendation of Jane Brocket. I had never been inclined to read anything by Alain de Botton, but she's just so enthusiastic about him. Plus, what I'm really looking for at the moment is any kind of Proust-extender - ever since I got over half-way through, I've been worrying about the day when I will run out of Proust. Maybe I'll be able to start again and keep reading him forever? But what if I can't? Maybe Proust is just like Dostoyevsky? My bookmark has been stuck in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov ever since Hemingway told me that you can't read anything by Dostoyevsky twice. There's no way I'm going to get stuck in a world with no more Dostoyevsky to read. That would be horrible.

Sourdough Bagels

The sourdough thing is now getting out of hand.

At first it was gratifying to think that I had baked something that Hayden actually liked (often he has to feign delight when I tell him I've been baking .. especially on his birthday, poor thing). I was really pleased when I baked a second loaf as good as the first - proof that it wasn't a fluke! My sense of pride grew and we made some to take along to a barbie as a gift to the hostess.

Finally, I think my sourdough bubble was popped last night. I felt roundly mocked when Hayden set out to make these sourdough bagels: he didn't follow a recipe, he just had a quick look on the internet, closed the computer and flounced into the kitchen to begin boilling up the dough.

I'm not going to tell you whether they taste good or not. Update: OK, they're delicious.

Exciting Delivery No. 1

The smell of our place has just improved - we have taken our biannual delivery of specialty coffee beans.

Plus, I'm baking my first ever loaf of sourdough. I got the recipe from this lady, who lives in a mudbrick house outside Melbourne. (Enough sourdough cred you think?)

Trust me, the smell of coffee plus baking bread is a real improvement on the smell of the yeasty starter I have been nurturing all week until it got sour enough to bake.

I have just peeked in the oven (again) and my sourdough loaf is looking very tall. I hope it turns out alright.

About Love

If you want to hear about rosemantic love, have a little read of this.

In the Shade

Here are some photos I took this morning as I finished up my walk in the shady expanse of the Townsville Botanical Gardens.

It’s taken me quite a while to develop an appreciation for these gardens. Back in Melbourne, we lived quite close to the massive and lavishly-flowered Melbourne Botanical Gardens. An easy amble on a sunny Sunday, down the left bank of the Yarra with a pause at our favourite art deco milk bar, would often end at the Botanical Gardens for a rest in the middle of the rose garden. In fact, all over Melbourne we were spoiled for beautiful English-style gardens.

When we arrived in Townsville, the appeal of these dank and overly shady gardens, infested with mosquitos, was really lost on me. I could well understand that it is too hot here for most flowering plants to grow, and that anyone who wanted a look of colour in their garden would instead plant one of the kinds with the variegated leaves. Back then, I thought they looked quite vulgar.




(These ones are actually known as Red-Neck Palms. How apt.)









I came to appreciate them more when I started to think about what I would plant in my own (hypothetical) garden in Townsville. Light and shade are super-important concerns here, because plants have to be really really tough if they are to survive the summer sun. The variegations of the leaves are a form of protection for the plants, a way for them to limit the amount of light they take in. Quite often it's only the new delicate growth that is coloured, while the rest of the foliage is ordinary green.

On the other hand, the plants that grow in the shade seem to require a really deep shade. The plants here are either super-tough or super-wimps. Nothing in between.

The Dazzle

Last July I was walking along this very beach with the smell of coconut tanning oil in my nostrils, trying to come up with an idea for a winter pudding and having no luck at all.

This time of year in Townsville is just dazzling - warm days and air so clear that we can see the far-off islands that are usually lost between the sea and the sky (if you click to enlarge the photo above, you'll be able to see them too). It's the way that the sun glances off the water - why doesn't it do this at any other time of the year?


It makes me wonder what was so wrong with summer? I feel that I'm being paid back for all my complaints about life here. And I also feel that I shouldn't post these pictures without offering to share - to anyone who's sick of wintertime, our guest room is open to you.

Golden Coats

We're back from the Gold Coast, which really only lived up to its name on the very last day we were there. It's always the way with beach holidays, isn't it? Cold, windy, rainy until the moment when you're repacking the car to go home.

We were down there in order to introduce my parents to Hayden's, as a sort of precursor to the wedding. In fact, my whole family turned up for dinner and it was lovely, just like the engagement party that we never thought we needed. The trip was also supposed to be a nice change for Hayden's parents, Ken and Jillian, from wintry wet New Zealand.

OK, so they didn't get to see much sunshine, but they did get to meet four extremely cute labby puppies, who spilled out of a car in the carpark of the Murwullumbah Rainforest Information Centre. Within one minute, one of the little fluffballs had already nearly drowned himself in the pond.

It was eerily quiet at the beach today

Wet and Cold in the North

Now it's wet and cold. Fat raindrops are glistening on our pet lemons (we've been watching these lemons grow for nearly a year now. It's going to be quite sad when we finally have to cut them up and put them in a pudding).


And look what's written on the thermometer:





sub-20 degrees! That calls for jeans and jumpers and the making of much cosy: a blanky on my knees when I'm watching TV, soups and roasted pumpkin and many other delicious carbs.

It's been a nice change, actually.