Refueling

Wednesday Night Skate last week started off small and kept getting longer. We ended up covering 26odd km in the end over the space of about 3 hrs.

It's important to refuel whilst you're skating that far, and twice as important to wear a paper boat as a hat whilst doing it.....

Politics

For those in the UK that aren't keeping an eye on Australian politics, there's a new prime minister and an election on over here. It's been a politically interesting last few months.

Setting the scene the previous prime minister (Kevin Rudd) was voted in in 2007 as head of the Australian Labour Party - it was a landslide vote that trumped John Howard and the conservative Liberal Coalition party in a way that was very similar to Blair's election in '97. All was going relatively smoothly (with the inevitable minor upheavals) until the ALP attempted to tackle the mining industry. Mining is HUGE business over here and one of the things that allowed Australia to weather the global financial crisis, and Rudd made the mistake of suggesting that a larger proportion of the profits made by digging out large chunks of the Australian landscape and selling them on to China should be passed on the Australian people. It was an interesting scheme - the increased taxes were on profit not income, so smaller Australian operations could be encouraged to take a risk knowing that if they didn't make any money they government would also take a 40% chunk of their losses - but it was a very bad fight to pick.

The big mining companies reacted with outrage. Presumably the billionaire board members were under the hammer - perhaps a youngest daughter wouldn't accept a used Ferarri as her second car, possibly the cost of Polynesian islands was on the up or it may have been as simple as an anticipated spike in the cost of truffles & foie gras. Whatever the reason they came out swinging with a $100,000,000 campaign against the ALP. Rudd stood firm but because the ALP had been in power for three years an election was looming and from what I can see the powerbrokers behind the scenes of the ALP blinked first. A leadership challenge quickly eventuated as one of Rudds greatest supporters, Julia Gillard, broke ranks and made a bid for the top dog position.

It was all over in a day or two. Rudd realised that the party was against him and handed over the mantle of leadership with grace and a tear or two. Gillard re-sheathed the knife & took the helm promising a brave new world for Australia. As an unmarried atheist woman choosing to live with her partner and not have children she could possibly bring a new approach to governance, and as a welsh-born red-head she certainly brings a whole new gamut of jokes to the party. However after living through Thatcher raping & butchering the industrial heartland of the UK to provide economic snuff movies for London bankers I realise that the concept of 'a womans touch' in politics is as irrelevant as it is patronising.

The first thing that Gillard did was to 'negotiate' with the mining companies. She agreed on a deal that would give them back $1.5 billion dollars of potential taxation if they stopped running the negative ad campaign. That's $1.5 billion dollars that has been taken back from the Australian people and pumped into the coffers of some of the most profitable multi-nationals on earth to give them the privelage of strip-mining the Australian wilderness. I guess the price of power is never cheap but Julia was prepared to spend a lot of taxpayers money to stop the miners saying nasty things about her. At least we can sleep soundly in our beds knowing that Isabella has both a prancing horse and a new car smell in her city runabout, that truffle pigs will be sniffing with their noses on the grindstone and that French geese will be tucking into full nose-bags with only a slight suspicion of what is to come.

Her second move has been to declare that she has negotiated a solution to the problem of handling refugees & boat people with East Timor. Unfortunately she seems to take a more colonial view of 'negotiation' than the parliment of East Timor, who rejected the suggestion out of hand.

An election date of 21st August has now been announced. Unfortunately my citizenship only comes into effect on 28th July, which means that I become Australian about a week too late to take part in this election. Still, since I'm not on the board of a multi-national mining company I guess that I will have as much say as any other Australian over who runs the country.

It's just a floating bus!

Brisbane is sometimes known as 'The River City' because of the Brisbane river. This flows through the city and its suburbs , splitting the entire area into the 'Northside' and the 'Southside'. There's a bit of a friendly rivalry between the two sides (similar to the North / South divide in the UK), although in fitting with the Southern Hemisphere setting the northern side is historically considered slightly more upmarket and the southside more industrial & working class. It's all a bit odd because the river runs North-East to South-West, so many 'northsiders' live south of the 'southsiders' they look down on.

The Story Bridge spans the river at Kangaroo Point
It was built in the 30's and although I've heard rumours that it uses steel initially over-bought for the Sydney Harbour Bridge I've not seen anything to back that up. I do know one factoid though - Australias shortest highway runs across it.

There is also a lot of traffic along the river. By far the best are the 'CityCat' catamaran ferries - the second coolest form of public river transport I've ever seen.

These cruise up & down the river at a surprising speed and have a great viewing platform at the front and back to watch the scenery glide past Kangaroo Point cliffs are quarried cliffs which have been opened up for rock climbing. They're illuminated at night and have free barbecues at their base to chill out after a hard evenings bolt-clipping. The Goodwill Bridge is a pedestrian / skate / bike only bridge with a nautical museum at one end (hence the boat in the picture above). The top of the bridge is the meeting point for the Wednesday Night Skate, and negotiating the bridge is also the first major challenge for beginner skaters.
There are many more sites to see along the river, and a $6 day ticket can have you cruising up & down the river all day. The one thing they need is an on-board bar! This of course means that the ferries are full of tourists every weekend, frustrating the locals. As a long-term Brisbane resident & friend once said when I got excited about them, 'It's just a bloody bus on the water!'
As an aside, there's a statue next to the river of someone tenderly doing up the laces for a child. Unfortuanely it's slightly ill-thought out and tends to get double-takes when first seen...

Bill Bailey

We ventured out last night to watch a Bill Bailey gig in the city.

First we thought we'd treat ourselves to a healthy tasty dinner. We had a tasting plate at a recommended wine bar in South Bank and although it was very tasty, it wasn't very filling. So we dropped in to the Japanese place just along the way to fill up. They've invented a new culinary sesation there - Sushi Tempura. What ths means is that they make sushi rolls in the usual way, batter them and then deep fry them.

Not sure if it's authentic Japanese but it's certainly tasty! And not at all good for you, as we both discovered later on. Coincindentally looking at the pictures later I noticed that one bit looks a bit like the contiment of Australia
After dinner we joined the crowds to watch Bill Bailey, an English comedian who was performing at a 'cosy' local venue

The show was a little flat, probably because of the huge hall and the difficulty of creating the kind of manic energy that I've seen him feed off at other gigs. I think an English-based repertoire of jokes & skits didn't help as although peple understood the jokes they didn't really GET them. He was funny - it just didn't flow as well as it could have. After a tip from a mate we stayed until the lights came on and he came back out for a more casual encore / resume, where he talked about the gig and how it went. That was a lot less cripted and felt much more personal. I think it's a regular thing with him so if you do see him, stick around till the bitter end.

On the way home I realised that the Tour De France was on live and in the mountain stages, so we watched the stage until the end and went to bed at 2am. Exciting stuff and I even stayed awake for it all - something that's now proving hard to maintain at work :).

Byron Bay 3

When I was a kid we used to go to airshows. I had a little 110 camera and I would take pictures of all the best planes, eagerly awaiting the return of my photos only to find some small & indistinct blobs against an grey overcast sky.

Something similar happens when you stand on a clifftop & try to take pictures of whales passing by

or dolphins playing in the waves The Japanese tourists were in their element though
Byron Bay is Australias most easterly point with some amazing scenery around the Cape

It was a great break from Brisbane, and only a few hours drive away. We'll be back - who knows, next time we might even go into the water...

Byron Bay 2

The apartment that we were renting in Byron was a little distance from the town centre. We were a few minutes walk from Clarkes beach and not far from the wave-lashed Tallows Beach. All we could hear at night was the distant crash of the sea and we woke up to the call of a whip-bird. The weather was beautiful again and we found a fantastic place to have breakfast by the beach

There was an art exhibition on the sea front with some interesting installations - although I'm not sure if the first one was an art piece or some backpackers looking for cheap accomodation

There are markets in Byron on the first Sunday of every month that are full of a wide selection of hippy tatt - we got an impressively large Camphor Laurel chopping board that we could put over the stove & use to roll dough & pasta on. We were laughing about how domesticated I'd become, how a few years ago I would have been walking along with a surfboard under my arm not a chopping board, and soon afterwards walked past a cafe where a guy stopped us and enthusiastically asked about where I'd got 'my board'. After a quick chat he declared 'she was a beauty' and I left with a proud glow.

The weather turned nasty on us soon after so we headed back to the apartment for a nap. After the rain cleared we headed back to the beach and I finally decided to go for a play in the water

Byron Bay 1

Byron Bay was great over the weekend - a lovely break away from it all. The weather forecast wasn't great but Saturday dawned with beautiful blue skies. Had a quick ride up to the beach on Saturday morning to 'check the surf' and it was flat as a bat

Still - hard to be disappointed. Even the bike had a beach theme :)

I used to surf over Easter in the UK on miserable rainy days in water so cold that it gave you an ice-cream headache. The water temperature was 20 degrees on Saturday so my mates back in the UK would be disgusted at me for not going in. Then again my mates over here would have been disgusted if I HAD gone in.

We went for a drive instead. First stop was 'The Crystal Castle', a new-age mecca set in the beautiful hinterlands inland of Byron. It fell very firmly on the commercial and indeed corny side of enlightenment - a charge that could equally be levelled at Byron itself - but once you looked past the cliches it was a very beautiful place

The Castle is set high in the rainforest with plenty of natural beauty as well

After dosing up on karma & good vibes we quickly took a look at Minyon Falls - dropping over 100m into the bush below

and then we visited Nimbin to experience the flipside of the New Age dream.

Nimbin is a small farming town that hosted the 'Aquarian Festival' in 1972. Since then it's become a mecca for hippie types and sadly also the centre of a very active drug trade. Marijuana is sold openly so backpackers from Byron arrive in droves. We were asked if we wanted anything to smoke about a dozen times in the space of a 50m walk (the first yelled out across the carpark as we were getting out of the car) and it wasn't a fun thing - the sellers weren't amiable dreadlocked hippies offering their favourite locally grown crossbreeds but youngish lads in hooded tops standing around in gangs offering industrially farmed, hydroponically grown hybrids bred only for strength. The whole town had a seedy, run-down and threatening air and we didn't want to spend much time there, despite the somewhat unusual 'hemp museum' with an exhibit which pretty much summed it up

I've had friends who've spent a few weeks staying in Nimbin and they tell me that it's a great place with a friendly, active & socially aware community. But that isn't apparent from first impressions. Slightly deflated we headed back to Byron but the drive through the rainforest & along the coast perked us up, particularly when we passed the big prawn.

In the bleak midwinter

Winter has hit Brisbane, with night-time temperatures dropping to 6 or 7 degrees and sometimes daytime temperatures not even clearing 20 degrees. Inland it's worse - they had a frost somewhere and pictures of cars with a white dusting on the bonnet made national headlines. It was apparently the coldest June in Brisbane for 27 years.

It's easy to snigger but the housing here isn't geared for cold, in the same way that the infrastructure in the UK doesn't work when the temperature rises. My flat is very open plan with large windows and patio doors and no in-built heating at all (which was wierd when I first moved in - I'm used to a fireplace being the focal point of the living room). We have a fan heater that we move around to keep the temperatures up and a big cozy 'doona' to sleep under but with blinds instead of curtains the cold rolls off the window and onto our heads.

It's hard to motivate yourself & get out in the evenings but I dragged myself out to a wednesday night skate this week and it was great - skating in just a t-shirt and dragging a hoody on when we stopped. We're also off to the seaside today for a long weekend - off down to Byron Bay. We've got wetsuits & bodyboards with us but will we get ourselves into the ocean? Maybe.


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