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St Francis of the ducks
Rhys and the muscovies had a love-hate relationshipFrom experiencing the hottest day in Melbourne’s history to the coldest April temperature in 60 years, we've had enough of Victoria’s crazy weather and are about to head north with all the other grey nomads who flee the southern states for temperatures kinder on their thinner blood.
For three weeks we were relief managing the caravan park in Rutherglen. One of the new skills I developed was how to evict bogong moths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogong_moth from the ladies amenities.
They are lovely moths, as moths go, but VERY BIG - about 10cm long. The night the April rains came in our first week, half a dozen lay dazed and confused on the toilet block floor. They are so substantial they look more like animals than insects and at first I thought I'd just quietly walk around them and hope I could have my shower in peace without being fluttered at and covered with moth-dust. Then my official status kicked in and I realised it was my job to eradicate the moths before they put the wind up the paying guests. In fact they were surprisingly cooperative - when I touched them gently with the damp shower mop in an attempt
to shoo them, they clung resignedly to the sponge and I could carry them out one by one, shaking them outside where they hit the ground with an impressive thump. They weren't there in the morning so I suppose they met their natural fate as a midnight snack for the resident possums.
Possums aren't seen as a pest here like NZ and these ones were pretty tame, scampering around the camp sites at night and climbing down trees to take titbits from your hand. Or trying to take your hand as I found out when I was chatting away to one in the dark after quite a few glasses of fine Rutherglen shiraz-durif and didn't realise it thought I was holding up some tasty morsel rather than my fingers. The scar has now healed.
The other significant wildlife was the flock of muscovy ducks which hatched after the lake started to dry out last year and had to be fed and watered by the camp managers Gary and Sue. Gary built a "swimming pool" for them out of a plastic basin with steps so they could get in and out without drowning.
You might remember the photo
Lake King
or as Sue and Gary called it - Lake Jo-King of Lake King, which forms one boundary of the park, from the November blog - the one with the No Swimming sign and just a puddle in the background. After Christmas it dried up completely and it now actually looks better - like a large sunken weed garden. But still no real home for ducks, so they spend their days nibbling round the edges of the park and waiting for scraps and pellets we gave them in an attempt to keep them from crapping on the concrete. At night they sleep on the road - because it's warmer - where they DO crap and Rhys had to hose down the duck poo each morning. He pretended not to like the ducks but really he did.
Other than creature-herding, our jobs were to check caravans into sites and people into cabins, take bookings, including the wine tours run through the caravan park, attend to email inquiries and mail (me) clean the amenities, laundry and camp kitchen (Rhys), clean the cabins (mostly me and Agnes but sometimes Rhys after weekends when we could have 7 cabins to clean).
Agnes was a life saver as she’d relief-managed the park for Sue
Multitasking
my work involved cleaning and answering the phone - usually at once and Gary, so knows what goes where and who needs what. She also lives in the park in her own caravan and had the knack of appearing in the office at exactly the right time when someone asked me something I didn’t know or when three caravans arrived at exactly the same time and want to be booked in quickly because it's about to rain or they've travelled for 4 hours and all they want is lunch.
The best part of the job was greeting people, knowing how they felt after several hours on the road and sorting out their van site or cabin, giving them information about the town, wineries etc and making them feel looked after. We’ve been on the road now for seven months and had a variety of experiences when booking into caravan parks. This park has a reputation for its friendly welcome and hospitality and it was easy to make that an important part of our job as we were used to being on the booking-in end. The reward is the smiling faces walking out of the office after coming in drained and car-worn!
The only tricky incident was having to evict a
My old scrubber
Rhys got the job that suited his talents best - we all know how good he is at shit-stirring family after complaints about their dogs - three snarley, yappy things they were keeping in a cage on their caravan site. This park is pet-friendly, whereas most of the bigger parks don’t allow pets. Unfortunately these dog owners weren’t pet friendly and let them bark all day. Rhys thought he’d solved the problem by talking with the owner who said they’d take the dogs to work, but they only took two, leaving the bitch on heat IN their caravan to crash and bark and whine all day!
A brief battle of wills ensued, verbally abusive on their part, outwardly calm and reasonable on Rhys’s part. Eventually they paid up and left. I just felt sorry for the dogs.
Much better house guests were; 1. Garry and Vicky from Mystery Creek wines in Hamilton with Dawn and Marty - who we discovered on our trip back to NZ in February were going to be in Melbourne at the time and thought they would pop up to Rutherglen for a vineyard crawl and a game of golf. Melbournians see Rutherglen as a regular weekend trip, but these hardy travellers were shattered by the time they got here - a 4
the greeting table
It was fun having a sun-downer here as guests drove up - it set the tone! hour drive. Yes children - it takes a long time to get places in this country!
And; 2. Torin & Andrea on their way from Melbourne after picking up stuff (which included Andrea!) to Sydney and their first apartment together (aaahh!). Now more of our family is in Oz than NZ. No photos of your visit guys - we must have been too busy!
So thanks Sue and Gary for taking a punt on a couple of Kiwis and giving us the experience.
We are now in the lovely historic gold town of Castlemaine, central Vic, while Rhys goes back to NZ as a present for his mater’s 80th birthday. Apart from being very reminiscent of an English village, the best thing about Castlemaine is that it’s on a main rail route between Bendigo and Melbourne - so I could catch a train and have a day in Melbourne by myself - YAY!
When I was packing for this trip I threw in a pair of polar fleece gloves, remembering how cold it gets in the outback at night. At 7.30am walking to the Castlemaine railway station I was pretty glad I had. Winter is winter
in Victoria. But trains are a wonderful, comforting way to travel. One of the less attractive aspects of NZ is its lack of a regional train system - Tim if you are reading this, tell David.
Aaahhhh Melbourne! As long as you can cope with the extremes of weather it can throw at you, it’s a great city. Melbourne thinks it’s London (the winter weather helps) right down to everyone wearing black and smoking. On past trips we’d walked around Federation Square and visited the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Rd, but I’d never been through the NGV Ian Potter Centre, in Fed Square - the home of the Australian art collection.
So after an obligatory coffee and cake in Flinders Lane I made a bee line for Ian Potter. Three hours later I dragged myself away, glad I’d decided to do the permanent collection and free exhibits first over the pay-to-view John Brack retrospective. Who knew there was so much there!? Even the annual exhibition of top secondary school art was varied and fascinating. And of course the actual building itself is a work of art - like being inside a giant Escher drawing.
I’d intended to do the NGV International as well, but now needed FOOD! Feeling like Asian, I was on my way to Chinatown when I realised that the whole of Swanston St had become Sushitown. (interesting observation - in all the sushi bars I passed, it was tall, good looking gen X&Y men who were buying their nori rolls and nigiri - is there a reason or was I just hungry??)
Another cultural institution I’d wanted to visit was the State Library, up the top end of Swanston St, as I’d learned it had an exhibition of Ned Kelly’s armour. Again - who knew?? This is not just a library (although obviously a very busy, well patronised and HUGE library) but another art gallery (the Cowan, focussing on portraits), a museum of books, including illuminated manuscripts, Japanese print books, comics, even computerised books, and also an interactive living public art work - the La Trobe Reading Room, where, under what was the largest dome of its kind in the world when it was built in 1911, you can watch from the surrounding balconies as people of all ages study, read, write and sleep at magnificent illuminated dark stained desks
Friends from home!
at back - some hobo, Vicky and Garry, at front, Dawn and Marty (what is he drinking?!) arranged in a beautiful radiating pattern.
It was fascinating to watch and even made the thought of studying again seem attractive. For a moment. Unfortunately it was so fascinating that by the time I got to the iron staircase to the top floor which held the Ned Kelly exhibition, there was a doorman at the top saying “Go down, it’s closed.” Bugger. I had seen a sign that the library stayed open to 6pm that night, but obviously not the top exhibition. Oh well - next time!
Out of the library and into the dark now, but Melbourne was anything but closed - it was gearing up to open up for the night, so I happily trotted along with the throngs of office workers let out of their cages. 45 minutes wandering the labyrinths of Myers and brightly lit sky scrapers cheered me up from missing out on my Ned.
Some shops were still open well after 6 as I made my way back down towards the Yarra and Flinders St Station. A city is so civilized. I’d read that the NGV International had late nights on Wednesday, so I carried on to check it out. The
All Saints vineyard gardens
The "castle" was built for the winery in the mid 1800s fountains were playing beautifully but the gallery was in darkness. Obviously not THIS Wednesday. Which was probably just as well or I would still be wandering the streets of Melbourne.
So I joined the polite crush of commuters at Flinders, hopped off at Southern Cross, bought a banana and a tiramisu ice cream for my tea (ooops, did I say that out loud?) and found the 19.17 to Bendigo, stopping at Castlemaine. Then for an hour and a half I could sit and go over all the beautiful things I had seen that day as the train sped me through the darkness.
The van park in Castlemaine looks over the botanical gardens, full of the deciduous trees that Victorians are so proud of. On the other side is the railway track - I can see trains through the trees and hear the plaintive WWOO00oooo00OOoo as they speed past the crossing. Maybe our next trip could be around Australia by train?
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