WATER TORTURE

It is usually about 4am when the enveloping cloud is at its heaviest that I wake to the sporadic drip, drip, dripping on the cottage’s flat skillion roof. The cosy cottage is situated under a massive old fig tree, its branches ranging far and wide above, the mist collecting on the leaves and forming into large droplets, which fall onto the iron, sounding like rocks at that hour of the morning. The constant beat follows no pattern, like a percussionist with no sense of rhythm and a broken hand, as I lie wide awake trying to fall back asleep. Have done a bit of maintenance on the bus, am trying to seal up any gaps where dust constantly gushes in whenever we travel on dirt roads, am looking forward to seeing how what I have done works out. I am looking forward to getting back on the road next week and heading north. We have a date at Dreamworld, we cashed in some Fly By points for a family entrance ticket and we are going to catch up with some friends in Maroochydore. After that we will just see what happens, we are heading north for some warmer weather and looking forward to some time on the beach. It has been a nice break here on the hill but the feet are getting itchy. A few facts about the trip so far: We have put 1036.6 litres of diesel into the bus, which has cost $1438.45. We have travelled about 3400 km on this fuel in the last 4 months, this does not include the petrol we have used in the car. We have done about 8500 km in the Subaru during this time.

CYCLONE PAUL

Up until a month ago we had only seen the one hitcher on the road, our friend the pig chaser, but since then the hitch hiker drought has well and truly broken. The first batch we noticed around the Byron Bay/ Mullumbimby area, an assortment of characters trudging along the gravel shoulders, subtly pointing at the road with their right index finger. Predominately young bearded guys with dark sunglasses and hippie looking woman in floral clothing, but occasionally we saw a mum with her child in a pram or an older gentleman. Having no spare seats we would have to drive past with upturned hands signalling our wish to help them out not being possible. We know what it is like to wait ages for a lift so we try to help when we can. The police breathalyser units must be on the ball around these parts, since we arrived in the Bowraville area we have picked up a few hitchers who have all lost their licences for drink driving. We were very lucky a couple of days ago, Mum and I went to town and picked up Paul on the corner of Upper Buckrabendinni Rd. who needed a lift, he wanted to go to the service station to borrow some money off a guy there, coincidentally we were going to the same place to get our puncture repaired. He was full of stories and it was hard to get a word in sideways until we dropped him off on the corner and went to find a parking spot, the smell of beer following him out thankfully. I got the wheel out of the boot and was carrying it to the service station when I noticed Paul bent over in the gutter throwing up. “Just made it”, he said. “Good timing!”, I replied. We described Paul to the hitcher we picked up the next day, brown beanie, mirror sunglasses, goatee beard, and he replied “Oh yeah, that’s Cyclone Paul, he is pretty wild”.

Our little mud brick cottage

Our little mud brick cottage is lovely - very rugged and basic, but nice in a really rustic way. The setting is beautiful, remote and peaceful. The glen is stunning and already I am beginning to recognise its moods through the day. It is stunning shrouded in early morning mist when we get up, before seven, to get the kids off to school, but as the mist clears and burns off, the views are splendid. It reminds me a lot of where Andre and I lived in Italy, in Northern Umbria - the rolling hills, the variety of trees, the distance to the nearest village and the colours. It was early winter when we first arrived there and the autumn colours surrounded us just as they do here. We also enjoyed the wonderfully warming winter sun, out of the wind, in a protected spot and lazing around like cats reading, as we do here. As the day moves on often we have clear blue skies and beautiful sunshine. It gets very cold at night, but the cottage warms up nicely. Although the other morning we awoke to find that Jack Frost had been and the ground was white and the windscreens frozen solid. Tal and Rennie were very impressed! Not something you see in Melbourne too often. Once again it is the birds that are the most accessible wildlife around us and we are getting to know our feathered friends well. There are a family of butcherbirds that keep a close eye on us and never miss a chance for something to eat. They are very inquisitive and show no fear of us what so ever. Each morning as we start our day, I greet them outside the kitchen window, all fluffed up against the cold morning chill. Recently Andre has caught me chatting to them. They are already friends. Then there are the rosellas and lorikeets that are in the trees chattering in the mornings and evenings, and the sole black cockatoo who flies over daily calling as he goes and bringing his friends occasionally. The rest of the time the air is filled with the calls and chatter of so many other birds, but unfortunately we don’t get to see them all and therefore identify them. We have also seen quite a few wallabies on the road. Most alive and some dead. Now that we are stopped for a while it provides me with an opportunity to tackle many of the tasks that are on the ‘to do” list, and of course the domestic chores have increased. More cleaning, tidying, vacuuming, packed lunch making – all the things I haven’t missed! So, despite missing the kids when they go off for the day, I still find my days quite full. We both look forward to hearing their news when they return at the end of the day. After having been with them 24/7 for the past few months, it is both strange and good to have some time on our own. Both Tal & Rennie have settled in well to the new school situation and it reassures me once again that they are strong, resilient children that cope well with what we throw at them. Rennie has friends keeping her seat on the bus each day and has been getting up so much better in the mornings than back in Melbourne. I thought Jarra would have missed the older kids more than he has. Apart from the first morning he now waves them off happily and welcomes them home heartily, but enjoys mum/dad/gran’s attention during the day. He is talking so much better these days. Stringing words together to make short sentences and starting to refer to himself as “I” or “me”. This has decreased the frustration he was feeling when he couldn’t make himself understood. Maybe because he is the third child, we deal with things better/differently or he is of a more relaxed disposition, but suffice to say that so far we have had few tantrums. Having said that he is a very cheeky little fella and often gets up to stuff he shouldn’t. Those blond curls and beautiful, brown eyes help him get the best from everyone he meets and occasionally away with stuff that he shouldn’t. Another benefit to being in one place is that our family and friends have been able to phone here on a landline, so it is good to hear their voices again and catch up on all our news. At times like this I am so glad that we have done the blog and it is great to know that they are able to follow our travels and adventures. When we talk on the phone I have time to hear their news and feelings, rather than try to catch up on so much stuff that we have been up to. Hearing how everyone else is going is so important. I have always realised that as soon as you stop doing this, then the connection is broken and relationships begin to suffer. One starts to feel less connected and it is hard to know where their life is going. Well for now my life is going to take me for a nice cup of chai and a relaxing read in a cosy corner of the cottage, before Jarra wakes up and it is all systems go once again. BFN! H

Butcher bird

Bus on the hill

THE BUS ON THE HILL

We first met Phil, the guy who owns the property we are staying at, when he drove up on his four wheeled motorbike and discovered our dirty great big bus stuck in his driveway. There is quite a dip where his driveway meets the road and as the back wheels are so far towards the front, the back of the bus stuck firm on the road while the back wheels spun….. oops….. His first words were, “So, you meant a real bus…” Ha! He got his big red tractor, took Jarra and Tal for a bit of a spin on it, hooked a chain to the front of Bessie and dragged her out. Phew! The bus is now parked behind the cosy mud brick cottage, up a hill on North Arm Road, she has a wonderful view across the valley, it is a very picturesque spot, snuggled amongst lush green rolling hills where deer, cows, and many birds call home. The rolling mist in the morning is an amazing sight, sometimes tufty clouds hang around the hill tops until the sun comes out and clears them up, and other mornings we are blanketed by low cloud which collects and drips off the trees like rain, then in the evening the mist rolls in again. We have the company of many butcherbirds here, black and white, fluffy, medium sized birds which are closely related to the magpie, we heard that they hang up their food in a tree and let it decompose a bit before eating it, this is where their name comes from. They hang around the kitchen hoping for scraps and will come inside and help themselves if we leave the door open. They are very interesting, if you throw a piece of bread up in the air, they will swoop down off their branch and catch it in their beak before it hits the ground. I caught a mouse in a trap in the kitchen cupboard of the bus today, my third attempt, it managed to swipe the cheese twice without setting the trap off, clever little bugger, but not quite clever enough. Helen suggested I give it to the butcherbirds. Well, they spied me carrying the mouse straight away and were swooping me for it, I layed it on a log and it was taken immediately. They are a funny bird. They have also been keeping me company as I have been working on some artwork in the shelter that I set up off the side of the bus; it is a magnificent place to work. I went into Bluescope Steel in Coffs harbour last Friday to get some material and the manager Sally was fantastic, she had seen an article about my work in their magazine last year and was happy to give me some steel in exchange for a piece of my work for their showroom, a good deal for us both. I have done a bit of work for Phil on his house down the hill, replaced some windows, and fixed a few other little problems to help pay our way a bit, it is quite satisfying to make things work properly again. So I have been creating some nice pieces in preparation for my next exhibition, when and where it will be is not known yet, I will start to work that out when I have a decent collection of work. I have a lot of designs that I have been working on during the trip so far and I now have a chance to put some of these into practice. Tal and Rennie have fit in very well at their school, Bowraville Central, which has classes from kindergarten to year 10, about 300 kids go there. It has been quite novel for T & R to catch a school bus in the morning and afternoon, but the early starts take a bit of getting used to, the bus leaves from out the front of here at 7.30 am and arrives back about 4.30pm. Bowraville is a fairly low socio economic area and the school gets quite a few subsidies to help out. It was interesting at the Athletics day last Friday, funnily enough it was the kids second day at school, there were so many parents there supporting, which is great for the kids, but a bit sad that so many were not working. My Mum arrived here last Thursday and she has enjoyed spending some time with the children and just getting away from it all for a while. It is actually very nice to have no mobile reception, no internet connection and only one TV channel, so we get to spend some time without these distractions, except of course for the very important show Survivor. Yep, the one channel we get is channel 9, lucky eh? Tal and I went to an Auskick session this afternoon in Macksville, they have footy training on a Tuesday arvo and then play a game on Sunday. It is a small Auskick centre, there were 9 kids taking part, but it is good to see Australian Rules Footy up this way. This weeks game is an away fixture and we will travel about an hour and a half to it, Tal really enjoys it and is getting very good at fitting into new surroundings and meeting new friends. We went into Macksville for lunch on Saturday, it poured with rain all day and I had the pleasure of changing a flat tyre in the rain after lunch by the side of the road. Wet?? We are planning on staying here for another three weeks or so, that is when the school term ends, not too sure yet where we will head to from here. Will wait and see if we can get the bus out first!!

Fiji - Rennie

Here is Rennie's post from Fiji ... We went on a plane to Fiji and we stayed at Zalen and Zahnee’s house. We found a new friend and her name is Lenea. I slept in Zahnee’s room. Andre bout me a t-shirt and it said “ Bula Fiji “ and it had turtles on it. We went to Mololo island resort. I learnt some Fijian words ; Bula – hello

BOWRAVILLE

Bowraville is about 10 km inland from the coast, south of Coffs (ahem) Harbour, the property we are staying at is another 22 km from there, half of which is a juttery dirt road which winds through the valley. It is a very beautiful part of the world. We are living in a mud brick cottage, it is a friend of a friend’s place and we are going to stop here for a little while. We have enrolled Tal and Rennie at the local school, they started today and are going to catch the school bus home this afternoon, quite a different experience for them, more later. A

FLATHEAD VIC

When I go fishing there is nothing specific about the type of fish I am trying to catch, if it swims, I’d be happy to have it. I freely admit that I am not a great fisherman, although I do enjoy watching people who know what they are doing. We saw a few examples of expertise on the coast recently, all very different ways to fish. Vic Henry, a 76 year old gentleman we met at Woody Point, N.S.W, fishes exclusively for flathead, a bottom dwelling fish. Vic knows where to find em, his art has been perfected over 50 years, he can actually feel them sucking the bait into their mouth, ready to strike, as he dances from rock to rock like a sprightly mountain goat, casting here and there, in and out, “You’ve gotta make it look alive”, he says, and, “You’ve gotta find them, they wont come lookin’ for you”. That’s all he catches! He went out in the morning and came back with three great flatties, filleted them there and then and gave us enough fish for dinner. Was lovely fish and a pleasure to meet such an energetic guy who is a cunning angler. Thanks for the fishing tips Vic! A younger guy went skin diving around the rocks, had a look around at what was there, then went and got his rod and caught the huge flathead he had found earlier. Another fella was fishing off the rocks, a pretty hairy place to be with the large surf crashing over the rocks as the sets of waves rolled in over the sea. He caught a great size tailor, about 8 kgs, using a lure made from cutting a 6 inch piece of broom stick handle painted silver with a stainless steel rod through it! Unbelievable eh? Quite a few people saw him pull in this monster fish and went over for a look. One of the first guys there said,” Whoa, that’s a horse!”. The fisherman replied, “Yeah, she’s a bit of a chopper!” As we watched him fillet it on the rocks a group of pelicans noticed the goings on and made their way over hoping for a feed. He cut the massive fish skeleton into 5 bits and let the kids throw them to the big beaked birds. “Watch this”, he said as he threw the triangular shaped head to one of them who caught it in his beak, turned it around and swallowed it whole, like a snake swallowing a dog. Funny to see.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

It is great to be back on the bus again. After over two weeks of sitting in Ros’s garden she started first try and we realised yet again that age is little to do with performance. Our old Bessie did far better than the Subaru, which we had to jump-start when we got back to Brisbane. Fiji was lovely. The wedding went smoothly and was great fun. We all had lots of new experiences. Tal and Rennie got right into snorkelling and were amazed at the world under the ocean, that lay just outside our bure. I often think about the great experiences they are having right now and wonder at how different their lives are compared to A and I in our youth. I grew up blissfully happy on my little island in Scotland and didn’t have the chance to do much of what they are doing until I was an adult. I remember the first time I went snorkelling in the Red Sea when I was in my early twenties. I was blown away! That was the same trip as I flew for the first time, travelled on my own, went to a country outside Europe – all things that our children take in their stride and hardly question. How things have changed. It was wonderful watching and listening to their experience of the trip. They hardly batted an eyelid in Lautoka. A city full of people, words and things far removed from their norm. Even when I asked them, they had little to say except that the people were so friendly. Everyone loved Jarra and it wasn’t unusual to walk into a shop and have him whisked away, to be fawned over for the time we spent there. I think I shocked a few people by offering to sell him to the highest bidder! He was great and handled the extra attention very well despite being kissed and pinched by complete strangers on a regular basis. Being back in Brisbane was loud, busy and fun. I like Brissie as a city. Amazingly it rarely felt rushed, except if you looked out the back of the house onto the road at rush hour. The river and the ferries help to slow things down I suppose, but it is also the people who seem to be fairly relaxed. They have a wicked museum and science museum, small compared to the Melbourne equivalents, but plenty to keep us going all day. On the weekend we took the chance to catch up with some friends from Melbourne who moved to the Sunshine Coast over two years ago – Nicky, Pete, Steph and Dean – and had a lovely day with them. As we won’t be up that way for a while it was great to see them. Asked if they miss Melbourne the answer was evident when we looked at the kids jumping in the pool and running round the garden (in May!). Climate can really make a difference and they are busier socially than they ever were in Melbourne. It is interesting to see how other families go with the whole relocation thing, especially interstate. I look forward to the day we finally settle down somewhere and have a place to call our own, but I also wonder about how it will be to start over again. I seem to have spent most of my life doing just that until I arrived in Australia and settled into life in Melbourne. It was very hard for the first few years and now, just as I have really started to feel connected, we take off on this great adventure. Go figure! Returning to Mullumbimby it was reassuring to see our Bessie sitting there in the sun. “Home again, home again. Jiggity, jig.” We were all relieved to be back in our bus again and pleased to see Ros, Elle, Georgia and Gemma. We met Ros and her lovely family in Nepal ten years ago. She and Paul were travelling through India and Nepal with three young children. We stayed at the same guesthouse and had lots of fun together. Andre and I were so impressed we decided that having children would hardly change anything (little did we really know!), so we tried, became pregnant with Tal and the rest is history. So, it is all down to them and their lovely girls! I haven’t seen Ros since Tal was 9 months old, but she made us feel so welcome. Thank you! The past couple of days we have spent at a most delightful spot on the Northern NSW coast called Woody Heads on the edge of Bundjalung National Park. It was bliss! A place where we all felt happy, content and at peace with the world The campsite is bang on the beach and the beach has a bit of everything for everybody. Great rocks for climbing on, fishing off or just plain looking at, lovely sand for playing in, busy rockpools waiting to be discovered and plenty of bird life including a whole group of pelicans (don’t know the collective noun for pelicans?!) The children played endlessly on the beach and I got to read my book, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger. It was a great read, an amazing concept. The key character suffers from a rare genetic disorder that means he time travels, without any prior notice, into his past and occasionally his future. It is, I suppose, a love story but I was fascinated with the whole idea of going back and seeing what one was like as a child or what ones parents were like and also how it changes him having to deal with turning up naked somewhere (he can’t take anything with him when he time travels), not knowing when or where you are or how long you will be there. Interesting. H