2nd week

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It’s hard to stay in bed…………The sun is just up. It’s warm. The birds are singing in the garden that’s fragrant with flowering jasmine, orange and lime trees and lots of roses . .
We suck on sweet/sour loquats and squeeze fresh lime juice. Somehow it feels like a time warp back to some childhood spring morning when the world was fresh and young.
But a good cup of coffee wakes me from that reverie!

We drive to an open air Saturday market fair. Everyone is so exuberant - don’t know if it’s the changing season or just the way it is here in the land of Oz! We buy hats for the sun. Drink melon juice with fresh ginger. Then drive down to the shore and walk on white sand, dip feet in the southern ocean and wander on the St.Kilda Pier.

Back home we pack a salad then navigate out of town towards the south finally onto narrow country roads and into farmland then across rough grassland and granite hills called ‘ Beyond the You Yangs’, to Mount Rothwell conservation area.

As the sun goes down about twenty of us gather there and “cook up a barbie”
Then as darkness falls we set off with a biologist guide and flashlights.

We were hunting for the rarest animals in Australia.
These are the small, nocturnal macropods that have been easy prey to the introduced predators – cats, dogs and foxes.
Wandering the pathways through the kangaroo grasses beneath skeletons of great, hollow, box eucalyptus in the torchlight, we saw squirrel-sized Eastern Quoll with babies, Barred Bandicoots, a couple of dozen Rufous Bettongs, a long-nosed Potoroo and Rock Wallabies with young.
And slowly the Southern Cross rose from behind the hills.
And the Milky Way wound round the sky. And we drove back into the urban lights to sleep our second night.


We’ve decided Melbourne is very civilized. Brothels are legal and graffiti is recognized as civic art! Walls and whole buildings are painted with wonderful graphics and mosaic murals are everywhere. There is loads of public sculpture, ads for every kind of show and exhibition, cultural event, theatre etc. And then there’s the street music. Buskers, for every taste, folk, rock, blues, didgery doo, even a solo Chinese euher player making magic outside the art gallery. Everyone we have visited has a house full of paintings and photos.

Dave is a freak for garage sales, fairs, markets, goodwill stores (op-shops in strine) and Balaklava, where he lives, is awash in these venues. So driving anywhere involves sudden stops to rummage through stalls of stuff on lawns or in homes or down an alley where the sally ann has an op-shop. And yes! There is treasure to find…………

As rural kids let loose in the big city Judi and Blad are easily sucked into the urban swirl but still with that time warp nuance felt around every corner.
In a climate like this everyone is a compulsive gardener, and condo and apartment dwellers often have allotments – not just to grow fresh veg and flowers, but to make wonderful, quirky vernacular art. Gardening centers and markets are a flood of exotic plants and there is a remarkable alternative living community project called Ceres with yurts, adobes, earthships and geodesics among allotments, chickens and goats, lots of green energy and a bicycle reclamation workshop. It’s in an old quarry 10 minutes from downtown but the flavour definitely comes from the ‘60’s!

Onward to another wonderful market. A beautiful Scottish girl with a tray of fried fish offers a sample - wow - it’s Duck Fish , Lunch is easily decided. A dozen Tasmanian oysters (big as my hand and perfect ‘fancy’ by Canadian standards) are added to the basket along with
great salad makings and a local beer – ‘Mountain Goat’ (of course!)

We drive home to cook up this fish and its flavour is like finest, freshest cod. Very good beer too. Interestingly everyone we talk to about Duck Fish, has never heard of it.


We have had a couple of rain days. This is important because much of Australia has had many years of drought including Victoria – which normally has the highest rainfall. A year and a half ago it was so dry that this region had terrible bush fires right into the western suburbs of Melbourne. Hundreds of people died. Yesterday we had a month of rain overnight! But those dry years have allowed a vast number of locusts to breed and hatch. They are now going through final metamorphosis into the swarming, adult phase and are expected to take to the air in the next week or so. The newspaper has articles reminding people locusts are good to eat - “tastes like shrimp and they’re free!”

Blad is unhappy that Dave’s kitchen cupboard doors are badly hung and the bathroom towel rack is jury-rigged. He finds tools, epoxy, polyfiller and a, new to him, Aussie wonder product called Builders’ Bog (smells like bondo; sets like rock in two minuets!)
A project is born. A few curses and a few hours later all systems work like magic.
Our grateful host insists on a reward …………though we protest that his wonderful hospitality is more than enough ……… “ Gotta surprise for you” he replied .

Holy shit! Suddenly the four of us are going to a Leonard Cohen concert!

The concert hall is also the venue for Australian tennis championships – the Rod Laver Arena. It seats 12thousand and it is packed.
There are jokes about coals-to-newcastle’; and Judi and Blad traveling 14000 miles to see their Montreal ‘home-boy’!

Leonard is great as ever…………The ensemble is incredible – The Unified Heart Touring Company; all are multi-instrumentalists. The back-up vocalists are aussi stars – the Webb Sisters and of course Sharon Richardson. The great Spanish flamenco player Javier Mas wowed us with his long solo riffs, many on the 12 string archilaud. Leonard knelt in homage to each of his band members as he carried us away to The Tower of Song.
He gaves us all the old greats ………… Susanne, Marianne, Manhattan, Hallelujah, No way to say Goodbye, One of us cannot be Wrong,. and many newer ballads The Future, In my Secret Life and Famous Blue Raincoat. We finally had to let them go after three encores: I‘m Your Man, a recitation of
A Thousand Kisses Deep and finally Take this waltz.

But as we rode home by the midnight tram, it was his opening song that played on in our heads …….Dance Me To The End of Love..
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11/11 11AM Remembrance Day

We walk across a bridge over the Yarra River and up through a beautiful wooded park to the Shrine of Remembrance - the cenotaph. It is huge; domed and pillared, built of honey colored sandstone.

It is warm and sunny.
There is big crowd of people, dignitaries, soldiers, cadets.
And a mounted troop of rangers in reenactment of first world war cavalry.
A single gun fires……………a minute of silence.

A lone P51 Mustang (1945 vintage) swoops low in fly-past.

The gun again………..

Then the vow of remembrance ………..”in the morning and at the going down of the sun………”
Lest we forget……….

Always a tear falls.

Inside the Shrine there is only the Tomb of the Unkown, but at the exact moment of 11/11/11 a single ray of sunlight passes through a hole in the Dome and for 11 minutes
slides across the tomb before the world turns onward on its axis.


We walk back slowly, towards the city. There are so many fantastic trees in the park; all of them new to us except for one or two maples ……. That add a poigniance to our mood.

THE GREAT OCEAN ROADS

Strine speakers can spin a metaphor sweeter than candy floss………. The girl at the car rental told us “This car’s so economical it’ll take ya a hundred kliks on the smell of an oily rag”.

We dive into left-hand city traffic, Judi at the wheel, B with the map. Six lanes and some very strange traffic rules later we’re doing fine and soon speed over the Westgate Bridge and south into open country on the freeway to Geelong.

This is the second largest city in Victoria.In earlier times it was important for the export of wool. Now it’s another busy modern city, another seaport, another waterfront to wander. We have lunch of mussels and chips on a dock where wooden boats tie up. Then drive on to visit Jan and Don in Ocean Grove. Five years ago they moved a big wooden Victorian House (due for demolition in Geelong) 30 miles to a 10 acre field on a ridge overlooking a huge marsh and lake. It’s a restoration work-in-progress. They have a great garden and planted an olive grove.

We talked away the night reminiscing about our lives and eating a feast of Thai food. Jan and Don lived in Thailand for 11 years and learned high culinary art. They also created Thai sign language for the deaf.
Long time once ago Jan and Blad were in the same caving outfit with Dave (who she married and later divorced)

Just before bedtime we noticed the picture on a calendar on the wall. A very familiar face was smiling out. It was David Dent! A man we’ve known for years in Quebec! And the calendar was a selection of portraits by twelve different photographers of happy people from around the world made for the NGO - M.I.L.K. It was a strange moment, a strange coincidence. A smile from home.

We slept in a Victorian bed in a Victorian room in Victoria.

Next morning we drove on to the coast that we had come to see.

The Great Ocean Road was started in 1919 and took nearly a decade to build; hacked from bedrock with pickaxe and shovel by vets returning from the First World War. It contours along the coast around cliffs, headlands, bluffs, creeks and gullies of the south coast of Victoria, for many hundred kilometers. Endless hairpin bends and sudden slopes and crests bring ever changing views of the turquoise Southern Ocean on one side and the dark forests of the Otway Mountains on the other. Breakers crash and the occasional surfer is out there trying for that wave, but it’s still a bit too cold.

We are staying in Lorne a little, seaside resort town with steep streets running up the mountainsides from a curving beach esplanade. Our house is nestled into the forested hill so it feels like it is really in the tree tops. Through the gaps between branches we can see the deep blue waters of Bass Strait and the distant high clouds over Tasmania 200 miles away,.
The first day the sulphur crested cockatoos and multi colored parrots joined us for lunch and they told all their friends that new tourists were here. Pink Galahs, red headed King Parrots crow-like Currawongs, and the ever present magpies helped pick-a-chicken and stole our bread!
Apart from being featured in a Kipling poem, Lorne is famed for the Erskine Falls.
A rushing stream has carved a steep canyon a few kilometers down the coastal side of the mountains. About mid canyon the waters tumble 30 meters down a ‘jungle’ hung cliff, beneath towering eucalypts; and below the falls giant tree ferns line the banks. Spring flowers are just opening, blue on the tangled vines and creepers that hang from the tree crowns. And above the roar of falling water the parrots and honeyeaters and mudlarks call to each other and make us smile.
Later we walked the board walk down to the pier to buy shrimps and fresh fish for supper. Shark heads were for sale for soup, and opera was on the stereo and a Greek fishmonger was at the helm.
Many flowers grow along the footpaths, most unknown to us, but also nasturtiums that have gone wild, calla lilies everywhere and wild arugula, are blossoming. In the wet temperate climate of this southern coast the fragrance of Eucalyptus mixed with Tea Tree is always in the air.

Tonight the moon and Jupiter are in conjunction, and out to the east Orion rises over Bass Strait. We can’t quite get used to this southern sky, Orion is upside down and so is the moon!

Next morning
We drove from Lorne to the 12 Apostles. It’s very long and winding road with many stops for spectacular vistas. First was at Sheoak Creek, a waterfall just off the road cascading down the cliffs. A Laughing Kookabarra looked down on at us from a high branch. This bird looks like a mix of huge kingfisher and a woodpecker and its cry earned it the nickname ‘laughing jackass’ Then onward for an hour till a roadside cafe with koalas slothfully clambering in the trees and on the bank, an echidna which looks a bit similar to a porcupine but is rare to see. It is the only living relative of the platypus and like that strange creature it is an egg-laying mammal. More multicolored, wild parrots, Red Lowries, Kings and Eastern Rosellas, descended on Blad when they sensed that he had food; one on each shoulder and one on his head.
A few more kilometers bring us to more open hillsides with green fields rising up to blue skylines with sheep and cows. Then the harbour at Apollo Bay for lunch in the sun as the surf rolls in on a pure white beach.
The road turned inland and climbed high over a massif of the Otway Ranges; winding through rainforest of towering Australian Mountain Ash – the tallest hardwoods on Earth. - and giant tree-ferns - relicts of the Carboniferous Era 200 million years ago - all hanging with lianas and the fibrous bark that always peals off the upper trunks of eucalypts.

Over the range we drop into the Aire valley, with wetland ranches and wild brushy marshes. A big, V winged, Swamp Hawk swoops low beside us, harrying some small critter in the reeds.

One more ridge to cross and there below us the sight we have come for. The edge of the great Australian Bight; wild and wind blown, with rollers roaring in as their tops blow off, and away to a misty horizon, high cliffs and headlands of honey colored limestone and sandstone.
And standing just offshore, great sea stacks and arches 150 feet high. These are the Twelve Apostles, their bases awash with surf crashing all the way from the Roaring Forties. In the cracks and crevasses Fairey Swallows make mud nests on the walls or sweep and soar around the ledges in the wild gusts.
We stand among many travelers from around the world, who are equally awed by these natural wonders of erosion.

Looking at the map we find an alternate way back, not wanting to face a thousand switch-back turns again. We drive home through big-sky country, rolling open ranchland of the giant ‘stations’ of cattle/sheep farming, very green and fertile everywhere thanks to this year’s rain.
Finally we cross the Otway Range one more time, as the sun goes down, the last rays shining through more huge eucalyptus in the national park; winding down narrow lanes of the Lorne Valley back to our home in the tree tops with lamb chops and wine and Tasmanian beer to end our day.

And to end it perfectly, as we drive up to our cottage, our first kangaroo jumped into the garden!


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