Beanz

If you needed any more proof that nothing in Australia tastes right, have a squizz at this. A few cents extra down Coles buys you the English Recipe, though just like the aussie version, it's made under licence in New Zealand.

I've compared the labels and found ours is higher in protein, theirs higher in carbs, but ours has more salt, hence more flavour.

On the subject of taste and sensation, the soaps don't smell the same (Dove soap has almost no smell) and the bacon is a shocker because it's illegal to cure meat in Australia. It's also illegal to make unpasturised cheese, so they import it by the truckload instead. If they could make it themselves, they couldn't charge you $85 per kilo for St Agur.

Abittot

It's the labour day bank holiday weekend and the mercury continues to rise; 29 degrees tomorrow, and by Wednesday we're heading for temperatures in the early thirties. In Darwin, the temperature has already reached 36 degrees and Broome's hit 40. It's abittot.

These kinds of Sydney temperatures are fine during the spring because the humidity is still low and the evenings are cool. Come January, the weather will be filthy day and night.

I knew summer was on it's way because I could hear it. This morning I heard the gate to the swimming pool open for the first time in months, quickly followed by the indignant quacking of the ducks who've been living afloat there since late autumn. And later I went down there myself, just to lie in the sunshine, and found all the spring flowers sprouting around the pool and three or four great big dragonflies swooping low across the water, something I'd run screaming from in Britian (because I don't like dragonflies), yet here I've begun to come to terms with the insects, with the exception of cockroaches. Cockroaches ooze their innards all over the floor after they die. Cockroaches must be stopped.

Anyway, tomorrow is October 1st and this marks the beginning of all sorts of seasons down under, like the no dogs on the beach season and the bushfire season. With 70% of New South Wales in drought, they reckon the risk of devastating bushfires is getting bigger every year, and as temperatures inland are usually at least 5 degrees warmer than down here on the coast, the prospect of hot windy conditions, as they've forecast for the coming week, is pretty worrying for the people who live there.

The other problem with drought is the failure of crops. The drought conditions here have continued for the past seven or eight years and this had led to huge fluctuations in the price of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets. I hear we have similar problems forecast in Britain after the summer floods destroyed the harvests, though the problem in Britian has been too much water while in Australia it's a case of much too little.

The drought has been particularly hard for the farmers on land in outback NSW, beyond the great dividing range. The land out there isn't much more than desert really; a fragile environment for growing crops. In the first few years of the drought they stuck it out. Then when things didn't improve they started re-mortgaging their homes to get through another year in the hope the rains would come, but they didn't. Finally the government has stepped in and offered financial assistance which allows them to abandon the farms altogether. Clearly somebody in the government believes climate change exists, they just don't want to point the finger.

Rolled Away

Another beautiful spring day here in Sydney sees us driving over the harbour bridge to see Scott and Steve, who despite having been here eight months, were yet to christen the communal barbeque in the grounds of their apartment block.

Scott and Steve pay a lot of money to rent their flat at McMahon's point, but when you sit on their sofa and look straight out of the window, the view's to die for. The garden here has two swimming pools and a barbeque with this little concrete picnic table, as well as it's own jetty if you fancy pitching up in your boat.

Ella had a fine time, though soon after she'd persuaded Daddy and Steve to get into the swimming pool, she decided it was far too cold in the water just yet, give it another month perhaps.

Anyway, just after I took the photo, she let go of the inflatable Wiggles ball and it rolled down the hill into the harbour. Batman stood at the end of the jetty looking very much like a man who didn't fancy jumping in, occasionally arching forward as though he might, then pulling back when he thought too much about it. Ella stood at the edge shouting go and get it in a bossy kind of fashion, uncannily like someone in the family, though I can't think who.

Then he spotted a jelly fish, a big one, or so he claims.

"Don't worry about it" I shouted, "it only came free with the Wiggles magazine, it's just a ball"

And with that, he came back up the jetty.

"The sharks have got it" I said to Ella "They want to play with it. And anyway, even superheroes get scared, even Batman".

God's Own Spot

And if it's Friday night and we've got a babysitter, there's every chance you'll find us here at the Opera Bar, with it's overpriced menu and overpriced cocktails, though with a view like that, you can forgive it anything.

We arrived a bit early and grabbed a table, we were waiting for Lucy and Paul to join us for dinner but as usual, they'd phoned to say they were running a bit late. Turns out they'd had to take Imogen to the GP because she'd come out in a funny rash; a rash the GP immediately blamed on furry caterpillars, though they're none the wiser whether that means Imogen's been touching them, eating them or reading books about them, just that it's nothing to worry about.

Anyway, the food was good, though by 10pm they'd cranked up the music and once again we found ourselves complaining about the racket and heading outside to the harbour wall to admire the view (they usually play mellow live jazz but tonight it was some sort of rock racket, not unlike the stuff they play on radio one in the morning these days).

As usual, we were bowled over by the sight. Does the novelty of this view at night ever wear off, I wonder. If you've never been to Sydney and you can afford to come to Sydney, you really must come because I've never read any travel book or travel guide that can do justice to the feeling you get standing here at Bennelong Point. I'm coming to think it's indescribable, and perhaps that's why nobody tries.

I swear you can breathe the atmosphere into your nose and mouth, especially on a balmy summer evening; it's as though the music and the chatter and occasional hoot of a ferry's horn hang in the air's humidity and you can't take your eyes off the way the harbour lights glitter on the water or the way the flying foxes swirl around the tip of the opera house, the underside of their wings lit by the same light as the sails. I could stand here and look at nothing in particular for hours, because only half of the experience is what you see with your eyes; the other half comes from the smell and the sound and the feeling of the warm air on your skin. And after you've been here, I'm not sure you ever really recover from it. You just go home and accept that's someone else's life and not yours; a place you went on holiday.

"God's own spot" I said to Darren as we stood transfixed.

"I was just thinking the same. Of all the places in the world I'd rather be, it's right on this spot"

"Me too" I replied. "I'm always complaining I'd rather be at Bennelong Point, it's the only place in the world I can honestly say there's nowhere else I'd rather be. When you stand on that spot, you just feel supremely happy, like the world has stopped moving and everything is perfect. God's own spot"

"So why don't you just move here?" said Paul. Paul is from Middleton in Manchester and still talks like an extra on the cast of Shameless despite several years living in New Zealand. He also keeps up to date on the British news via the BBC world service, so he's absolutely no good for a game of Dead or Alive either, because he knows all the answers. Paul has a way of saying things that give the impression you possibly think too much. If you love Australia so much, move to Australia. End of.

I didn't answer him because I didn't know how to. We went for coffees at City Extra instead and we changed the subject.

Friday Arvo

If it's Friday arvo and it's 28 degrees, you'll find us down the beach.

As usual, we togged Ella up in her sunsuit before she went paddling. Then like a pair of hypocrites, we climbed under the grill (which I supposed you'd say was set to medium).

We're getting a bit of colour to show for our year away. Ella's just getting brown feet.

Poster

I told you the Sydneysiders don't get on with the Melbournians. You need to click this to see what I mean.

This old poster is taken from a series of posters encouraging people to visit the south-west pylon, which used to be open to the public years and years ago (and had real live cats at the top for some odd reason; cats with a cat merry-go-round).

If I were a Melbournian, I'd have been tempted to deface this.

More Bridge Facts

(1) If you needed reminding, this bridge is much bigger than the one in Newcastle. It's the heaviest bridge in the world because it's made of iron. They couldn't have a suspension bridge because it wouldn't take the weight of the traffic.

Incredibly, they built it with seven lanes for car traffic, as even back in 1932 they realised they needed to plan ahead. If you speak to any taxi driver in Sydney, they'll start crapping on about this and asking why the Lane Cove tunnel (opened this year) has only four.

(2) They just can't bear to lose, can they?

Bridge Climbers

In 1998 they decided to open the bridge to climbers, and in the first five years, over a million people went over the top (including us - we did it in 2002). The upshot of this is it's impossible to take a photo of the harbour bridge without this little line of ants somewhere in the shot.

The Bridgeclimb is okay but it's incredibly expensive, ranging from about £79 monday to friday up to £176 to climb at dawn (and they love the tourists so much that they put the prices up in December and January). In any case, I think the views are just as good from the Pylon, especially the views of the bridge, because when you're on it, you can't take photos of it, can you? (and the Pylon costs about £4 to get in).

Not that you can take a camera onto the Bridgeclimb, because they're very strict about what you can and can't do, so you can't take your own camera in case you drop it (and because they want to flog you very expensive offical photos) and you have to be breathalysed before they'll even consider strapping you into the jumpsuit (unfortunate choice of word), the jumpsuit being the same colour as the paintwork on the bridge so you don't distract the drivers down below and cause a bingle. In my case, the sight of my arse in a jumpsuit descending a vertical ladder was enough to cause several car bingles, though thankfully nobody looked skywards and the day was saved.

They keep you for over two hours, an hour of which is spent mucking about finding caps that fit and putting on radios and climbing through a mock-up of the safety-harness thingy, so by the time you finally get your hands (or feet) on the bridge, you're about to pass out with the antipation of it all (or was that just me?).

Anyway, here they are, the bridge climbers at 2.30pm this afternoon. The top of the bridge flies the Australian flag alongside the flag of New South Wales. What you can't see is Blinky Bill, the little red flashing light that warns aircraft to steer clear. The real Blinky Bill is a koala character in a very old (and very classic) series of children's stories written by Dorothy Wall. They say no Australian childhood is complete without the adventures of Blinky Bill so I've bought the stories on audio book for Ella, though on balance, I think I prefer the one on the top of the bridge.

A plea to tourists - do the Pylon as well as the bridge. You'll appreciate the bridge much more if you've been in the pylon first.


Nb Car Bingle, n, A car accident (Australian)

Lookout - II

(1) The view back towards Circular Quay and the city centre.

(2)The road that crosses the bridge is called the Bradfield Highway, though trains go across too. You can also see Sydney Observatory in the top right corner if you click and enlarge this shot.

Lookout - I

Check out the bridge casting it's shadow on the water in the first photo.

Bridge Anorak

On reaching the top, I was one very happy bridge anorak.

Building Bridges

There had been calls for a bridge across Sydney harbour for ages before it was finally built, but the government thought it would be too expensive and kept turning the idea down. Until the bridge opened, the ferry system transported about 40,000 people a day across the water between the city and the north shore.

The harbour bridge was built over the course of seven years using money borrowed from the British government and provided employment for thousands of families in the area during the great depression, earning it the nickname of "the iron lung".

It was opened in 1932, but much earlier in the century there were already some ideas in the pipeline and in 1903 they approved the design in the first photograph, though the goverment later changed their mind. Hard to imagine Sydney with that bridge instead of the one they ended up with, isn't it?

The second photograph is a replica of the central pin holding the bridge arch together. They built both ends of the structure simultanously and got it to meet in the middle with this thing; a fantastic achievement, especially when you consider they didn't have any fancy machinery to help them and built most of it using men suspended on ropes (16 died). Thank god there was no such thing as health and safety at work; the thing would never have been built.

The Pylons

There are four of these things on the bridge, though they serve no useful purpose, they're just part of the design. The Tyne bridge in Newcastle was built before this one but doesn't have the pylons, which I hadn't realised.

The south east pylon is open to the public and for a fee of $9.50 you can climb the many stairs to the top for some stunning views. Thankfully there are a couple of exhibitions on the way up, which gives you an excuse to stop before the wheezing attracts too much attention

Circular Quay

The temperature today topped 25 degrees and still it's only the beginning of spring.

We headed out for lunch at the Lord Dudley in Woollahra, you know, the English Pub nestled in all those posh houses and art galleries, the place that's got Newcastle Brown ale, pork pies and a dartboard. Walking into The Dud feels like someone just put their arms around you; a comforting reminder of home. Mind you, the garden downstairs is a bit wide of the mark because it's got a corrugated plastic roof with vines hanging down from it, nothing like an English pub garden at all, though they do write the menu on a blackboard and the food's great, so we'll let them off.

Afterwards we took the train from Redfern station down to Circular Quay. Redfern station is worth a mention because it's the last stop before Central station in downtown Sydney, and as such, getting off at Redfern is local slang for the practice of coitus interruptus, if you see what I mean.

It's the first time we've ever arrived at Circular Quay by train and this is the view you get from the platform. The ferries all stop here on their way to places like Taronga Zoo and Manly and they're all painted a patriotic mix of green and gold as you might be able to see form the one in the picture.

Anyway, I had other fish to fry today because we were heading for the Pylon Lookout, which has been on my list since we arrived.

Bring on the bridge.

Push Pull

We had friends over for dinner last night. This marks only the fourth time we've had visitors to our flat in eight months, and one of those was a bloke selling us a futon.

We're fond of entertaining back home, we even enjoy cooking. Darren in particular, enjoys the satifying glug of red wine as he pours it into glasses, though after the second bottle he does tend to lose track and we can almost demolish the wine rack across the course of an evening, which makes entertaining a bloody expensive hobby when you think about it.

I must admit it's been kind of nice not entertaining for a while. The problem back home is that Darren works loads of weekends. So when he gets a weekend off, we usually owe somebody dinner and although we enjoy the social side of this, it can sometimes be difficult to fit it all in and before you know it, you've spent every weekend either working or cooking and you realise you've spent no time at all on yourselves as a family.

Before we had Ella we spent even more time cooking and entertaining, though things really came to a head for me when we cooked for four friends over the course of one weekend; four friends who knew one another but who, on balance, preferred not to spend an entire evening in one another's company. The upshot of this was that we cooked for one set on the Friday evening, got up next morning, washed the dishes and set the table, then started all over again on the Saturday for the second couple, using exactly the same menu. By the Sunday we were miserable and exhausted and had eaten the same food two days running. After that I realised you can sometimes be too accommodating, so these days we try to strike a better balance.

Then again, going from rounds of entertaining at home to Billy No Mates in Sydney is hardly what you'd call striking a balance, so it was nice to have Liza and Dan around last night, especially as Batman had a gap in his superhero itinerary, which meant he spent the day shopping and cooking instead of me, and though I did lay the table, it was hardly a bother; no nice cutlery to fuss over, no napkin rings, just four IKEA plates on a cleap IKEA table. The result was a smashing Thai meal and quite a few bottles of the Rioja we bought in Orange, which means the wine rack's been demolished again, just like being at home.

Dan and Liza are both British. They came to Sydney seven years ago, never intending to stay. Then Liza had some problems with her back and the physio advised her not to fly long haul, which was a stroke of luck really because they both stuck around and got jobs and they've never really looked back.

Then Dan's father died four years ago and he went home for the funeral. It was the first time he'd been back and Liza was worried he'd realise they'd made a big mistake. But within 48 hours he'd telephoned with the words "eveything's the same here - there's no reason for us to come" and after that they stopped renting and bought a house and now they've got citizenship, which means dual nationality.

Anyway, it wasn't long before I'd managed to engage them in a game of Dead or Alive?, an entertaining pastime I discovered through conversations with Jan, who had no idea what had gone on in the British news over the last seven years because Australia only reports it's own stories. Dead or Alive? provokes a series of incredulous faces when they discover who's dead, Bob Monkhouse being the biggest shock, closely followed by Mike Reid (though people do tend to think you mean Mike Reade and start talking about how they used to watch Saturday Superstore as a kid, and god, he must have been young, what a waste).

And everyone wants to know about Brucie. Is Brucie dead? And I'm glad to report he's not, which is a relief all round because, as they always say, "Brucie will never die".

Liza's a doctor, recently qualified as a consultant. Dan does something in IT. This 50/50 split of medics/non medics at the table meant they had to talk about something other than, well, medicine. Even speech therapy got a cursory look-in, though as usual, the topic only came up when the medics realised they were monopolising the conversation. This happens a lot in medical circles, particularly in large gatherings where the doctors are married to doctors (whose fathers were doctors) and hours down the line, someone will realise I do something else for a living and do the polite thing of asking me about it, which then goes one of two ways, either (a) they want a brief reply before moving on to further medical topics, or (b) they come out with some vague comment about lisps or stammers or strokes that betrays a complete lack of understanding of my profession, one I can't even be bothered to correct.

"So how does speech therapy compare on the other side of the world?" asked Liza

"No different" I replied. "I hate it both ends", a brief reply, the sort that was being called for.

"Well I wouldn't go back" she said. "I grew up in Bodmin. Have you ever been to Bodmin?"

"Funnily enough, no, though I lived in Cornwall for a year when I was a child, not far from Bodmin. Bodmin was a place you got off the train, somewhere with a bypass and a beast. Do you believe in the beast of Bodmin Moor?"

"Arr" said Liza, slipping into a vaguely south-west accent. "No. The only beast of Bodmin Moor's my mother and the rest of my family. They're dysfunctional, that's why I stay away. My dad sends me the Cornish Guardian every week, all wrapped up in brown paper"

"And she doesn't even read it all" said Dan. "She just reads..."

"Births, deaths and marriages" I said.

"Exactly" said Liza.

"I was the same with the Warrington Guardian. My mother sent it to Southampton and Reading every week for years. Sixty pence postage, but I did enjoy pouring over it".

"Well I've thought about going back to the UK" continued Liza. "But all I can think of is Bodmin and I don't want my kids to have the same upbringing I had. Sydney's a long way from Bodmin in every sense"

"So you're planning on having kids"

"Yeah, though both our mothers have told us not to bother. Dan's mum said it's like the weight of an anvil round your neck and my mum's had plenty to say about it in her letters"

"Letters? Why doesn't she use e-mail?"

"Oh don't get me started on that. She writes a letter every week"

"Yeah" said Dan "And you send her a postcard back to Bodmin every week, have done for seven years"

"Don't you run out of postcards to send?" I asked, imagining this poor woman in Bodmin with a collage of Sydney postcards all over her fridge; the bridge by day, the bridge by night. Kangaroos surfing the waves at bondi. Koalas with cans of XXXX.

"Well no. Whenever we go on holiday I buy a handful of them. In fact I'm still sending the ones we bought in Vietnam last year. For all I know, she thinks we're in Ho Chi Min City. Anyway, the life's much better here isn't it? I had a day off the other day and I went walking the dog down at Maroubra with my friend Bernie, then we sat in a cafe drinking wine and we were both like "cor, look at this. It's great innit? There's no way we'd be doing this on our day off back in Sheffield".

"And life's better as a doctor?"

"Oh god yes. The salary, the hours. I start my consultant post in January and I'm contracted 22 weeks a year"

"That's a lot" said Darren. "Some of the other jobs are much lighter than that"

"And they give me a guaranteed cut of the private work, which goes up every year I stay. You're looking at about $50,000 on top of my salary just in the first year, and that's without the work in other places like Lismore and Coff's Harbour, I can earn about $5000 for a 24 hour shift in the private hospital there. It means going away from home overnight, a quick plane ride, but I don't mind that when my permanent job's going to be in Sydney. Oh yeah, and you'll never believe this. The consultants in my new job own a vineyard in Mudgee. A bloody vineyard. They've all got a share of it as a sideline.

We walked past an Audi garage the other day and went in and bought a brand new Audi to celebrate passing my exams. And you're asking me where I want to live? I've worked damned hard to get to consultant level, I want something nice in return"

"You don't mind your kids missing out on family?"

"Well, like I said, my mother can't see a reason for us to have any. What will they be to me? she said in her last letter. I might see them three times in my lifetime. They'll be nothing to me".

The pull of the city, the pull of a lifestyle we can only dream about. The push of house prices and crime and dark winter mornings.

And then there's my conviction that it takes a community to raise a child, when our community's back in Britain. The words of our aboriginal tour guide ring in my ears; you gotta know your culture 'cos it's your heritage. Without that you ain't got nothing.

Nothing but a brand new Audi on the drive and a cocktail by the pool. What luck to spend a year in Sydney, what terrible misfortune to face such a dilemma.

Bi-Polar

Tuesday 25th September

Talk about my name being mud; I wasn't the most popular person in the office today - it turns out I went away to Orange with the keys to the company car in my handbag and didn't realise what I'd done until Friday night, by which time they'd already left three messages on our answerphone at home.

Typically, I'd chosen the only weekend in the year when the car was being used to drive to Canberra for some charity event or other, or rather, it wasn't, because the keys were the other side of the blue mountains.

The fact they'd been ringing our home phone proves my theory that the people I work with don't listen to a word I say, because I'd told them a couple of times that we were away for the rest of the week, and they did have my mobile number, they just didn't use it. In any case, I don't think they really care what I'm doing when I'm not at work because they've certainly never invited me to their parties or their barbeques or away for a weekend to their country properties. I think working part-time has something to do with this because you never really feel part of the team if you can't join them down the pub on Friday afternoons.

Anyway, today was the playgroup excursion, something they do every term, and since April it's fallen to me to organise it, which is a bit like leaving me in charge of a tuck shop because the trips I've chosen have nothing to do with the kids and everything to do with the bits of Sydney I haven't had time to see yet.

So today I took eight pre-schoolers and their parents by train to the National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour, where a lady dressed as a pirate took them all on a treasure hunt and dressed them up in costume, leaving me free to have a sneaky look at the exhibitions, which included the anchor from General Phillip's ship Sirius.

"Jackie, look at this" I said

"What?"

"I think it might be the actual anchor from the Sirius. Hang on...yes, bloody hell, it's the real thing"

Jackie fixed me with the look she reserves to indicate she thinks I'm bonkers, bonkers in an eccentric British kind of way, at least that's what I hope. Jackie wouldn't know a historic artefact from a bar of soap, one of her favorite sayings.

"Oh Smashing" she replied in a mock English accent. The Australians don't say smashing in their own language, it's what they think the poms say in theirs.

"Yeah well, I think it's interesting. It's your history, not mine"

Afterwards we walked back around Darling Harbour in the sunshine and I commented to Jackie how lucky I felt to be out here in the sun and being paid for it.

"You're weather bipolar" she said. "The minute it clouds over, that's it, you've had enough, you want to go home. Then the sun comes out and the emigration's back on again".

She's right, I'm weather bi-polar. It's good to have a diagnosis, perhaps now I can get some help for it.

Bells Line of Road

We returned to Sin City via Lithgow, a small mining town on the western edge of the blue mountains, where we stopped for lunch at the local working mens' club (the workies). A childhood spent drinking bitter shandy in the Penketh and Sankey Labour Club (where he was serving behind the bar at fourteen) has left quite a mark on Batman, who still finds it impossible to pass any establishment offering a meat raffle, much as I've tried to beat it out of him.

The funny thing is, the older I get, the more I love this kind of thing myself, because the sort of people you meet down the workies make a refreshing change from the terrible competitive snobs you meet in professional (or city) circles. And the Lithgow workies is a real gem of a find because not only are they holding a meat raffle but they also serve a cracking roast lamb dinner for $10 (£4) and a kid's serving for $4.50 (£1.80), a far better bet than a $60 breakfast bill for breakfast at bill's down in Darlinghurst.

(And this marks us crossing the line between tourist and resident because there's no way the tourists would find the Lithgow workies - the tour buses don't stop here. How ironic that half my family don't speak to me anymore because they think I've gone posh).

Now the people of Lithgow have it made because apart from the meat raffle, there are two huge bowling greens (I counted 61 people bowling in the midday sunshine) and the members get a free meal on their birthday. The place was so busy we couldn't find a parking spot and the inside was buzzing with retirees playing bingo or chatting by the plate glass windows, and people of all ages queuing up at the carvery.

There's absolutely nothing like this in Britain as far as I can think, at least, nothing on this sort of scale. It makes me wonder what our old people do with their time because here they can rock up and have a cheap rounded meal every day, catching up with their mates. Surely once you get to your seventies this sort of place becomes a lifeline for your general wellbeing and I couldn't help thinking it was the sort of place I'd be happy to grow old, unlike the UK, which is beginning to seem very depressing again since the sun's come out and Australia is sprouting out all over.

Anyway, after we left Lithgow we followed the convict-built Bells Line of Road back to Sydney, which takes a bit longer but offers much better views across the mountains, a bit like the grand canyon in parts (in fact there's a place here twinned with Flagstaff Arizona and having been there, we can see why). Unfortunately there were no decent vantage points so I couldn't get a photo.

At the end of the road, we stopped at Windsor, which is set on the Hawkesbury River. Windsor is one of the oldest inland settlements in Australia (one of the so-called Macquarie towns because it was deliberately planned by governor Macquarie in the early days of the settlement). There are some nice old buildings here, some very Australian-looking (see photo) and some very British-looking, but they haven't made much use of the river, which is as wide at the Thames running through Berkshire yet has all the charm of the Mersey running through Warrington, which isn't much.

Ella didn't care though. She has a new hobby-horse called Ned (hand made in Orange from some sort of mop, as you'd expect) and she rode him right the way down the main street in Windsor, across the road and down to the river, where he enjoyed a handful of grass and had a poo under a tree.

Aunty Lou will approve of him, I think, though hopefully he won't end up in a box under her stairs.

The Batphone Rings - 5

The Batphone rang and our superheroes were up in the air just as soon as they'd pulled the lid down on the gas barbeque - another perfectly good tray of snags goes to waste.

Their mission - a twenty minute flight to a small settlement up on the Dividing Range, where a six year-old boy had been run over by a Land Rover Discovery.

Batman's main task was giving the patient some fluids and painkillers (morphine) and getting him to a CT scanner as soon as possible. The Land Rover had gone right across his stomach, so the potential for damage was huge. His mother came in the chopper, as you'd expect.

"God, she must have been beside herself" I commented when he swooped back in.

"It was his mother who ran over him" said Batman. "She was pretty calm in the circumstances".

Patient Update

The little boy is remarkably unscathed - stoic, like all country people, says Batman - and he's going to be fine.


By the way - Batman wasn't joking about growing an Aussie moustache. The chopperdoc registrars have agreed a pact to grow a good crop of Aussie facial hair. So far he just looks like Jon Thompson from Cold Feet, but I'm sure it'll be a bit more convincing by January.

I can't wait.

The Estate Agents

Excuse me while I indulge in more drooling over these beautiful houses in Orange. I have the impression life in these streets hasn’t changed all that much in the last thirty years – and don’t they just look exactly how you imagine Australia would look?

Anyway, if you’re interested in what your money would buy out here in Central New South Wales (4 hours by car, 1 hour flight from Sydney, flights daily), I’ve been doing my homework with the estate agents. We’ve worked out we could buy a nice family house here and a flat in Sydney, which we could rent out to tourists as well as using as a weekend home when we fancied being in the city. Not that we’re going to do that; it’s just interesting to look at what you could do. All of these properties are detached…..

A church to renovate into a home – £24,000 (yes you read that right)

A five bedroom house on half an acre in the countryside – £108,000

Either 73 acres of land with a lake or an 1887 three-bedroom post office – £126,000

A modern four bedroom house like the ones on Neighbours - £153,000

Either a 4 bedroom house on 3.5 acres (with a chook shed) or a 1920’s café and shop with three bedroom house on a half acre block (both in the countryside) - £170,000

A modern four-bedroom home constructed of reclaimed brick, with 5.8 acres, two paddocks, stables and a chook pen - £254,000

A four-bedroom house on 50 acres with a dam and five paddocks - £264,000

A four-bedroom homestead with 20 million gallon lake, double garage, ancient snow gums, paddocks, shearing shed and spring water supply - £326,000

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Lament

I read in today’s Sunday Telegraph that 500 people are leaving Britain every day and most of them are coming to Australia. The most common reasons they give include rising house prices, fear of crime and the weather, and many of them are so convinced they’re doing the right thing that they emigrate without ever having set foot in the country before.

I’m not completely convinced about the research – I mean, after the summer of 2007, I think you’d find plenty of poms chucking their toys out of their cot and threatening to go to Australia, but it’s sobering to read it all the same.

After we left the Chopperdocs hangar this afternoon, (where I suspected Darren had designs on a sneaky forty winks in one of the bedrooms, much as he denied it), Ella and I went down to Cook Park in the town centre for a mooch about, which got me thinking about what I’d read.

The park was planted in the 1870s, and because of the cool European-style climate up here on the Great Dividing Range, they were able to plant all sorts of trees and flowers that wouldn’t normally survive in the Australian heat, including Scottish elm trees, English oaks and the beautiful magnolia tree in the first photo, which came from France. The overall effect is very familiar; the park looks like something you’d have found in any English town thirty years ago.

So there’s an aviary and a duckpond, the aviary home to a variety of parrots including a sulphur-crested cockatoo which says “Cocky want a biscuit?” in an accent Dame Edna would be proud of. And there’s a bandstand, which is completely free of any graffiti, a set of swings and a fernery, where I’m assuming they grow ferns, though I didn’t go inside and check.

At the north end of the park, there’s a little house selling arts and crafts, including shelf upon shelf of woolly cardigans, babies’ matinee jackets and home-made lamington cakes; three old ladies click-clacking away in various corners of the building, one eye on their knitting and one eye on the customers.

The sound of the knitting needles reminded me immediately of my nana, who used to knit cardigans just like the ones on the shelves (though she wore bifocals, which meant she could keep her eyes on four things at the same time, not two). I was so struck by all of the knitting that I wrote in the visitors’ book how much it reminded me of my nana, followed by her name, as it’s just the sort of place I’d like to see her name written for posterity and anyway, as she seems to follow me about sending message from the other side, I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough whether she agrees.

But the most revealing thing about the park was the conservatory, which was built in 1934 for the purpose of growing begonias, and though the caretaker tells me they do get the odd broken window (kids round here are bloody baggers), the place is otherwise intact and beautifully maintained and still open to the public for the viewing of those begonias as and when they fancy.

Now I knew Orange was a nice country town, but it was the begonias that did it because not only are they growing untouched in this lovely ornate glass house, but they’re growing in rows and rows of plant pots as you can see, and nobody’s thought to nick them.

We used to have parks like this in Britain.

When I was a little girl, Bank Park in Warrington was a bit like this, except there was the lovely town hall building in the grounds, better than anything they’ve got here in Orange. And we had an aviary full of parrots and a glasshouse full of exotic plants as well, but somehow they both fell into disrepair and these days they’re completely derelict. The sad thing about this is that nobody seems to care. They’ve just spent millions building a swanky shopping centre so we can keep whacking Christmas onto the credit card, when just up the road there’s a park that could be almost exactly like this one if only people had a much interest in feeding the ducks as they had in shopping, as much interest in areas of communal use as they have in feathering their own nests in IKEA. I realise this makes me sound a bit old-fashioned, but is that such a bad thing?

The reason I’m telling you this is because when I think about Bank Park, I think the 500 people leaving Britain every day are right (and brave) to do so, though what a pity they feel there’s no hope left. It’s like they’ve accepted nobody will ever care about restoring the aviary and they want to live somewhere better for the kids, somewhere more like Britain used to be.

I’ve always felt Australia was thirty years behind Britain, but what I’m struggling to understand is whether this country will ever feel so similarly hopeless that 500 people a day will be leaving for other shores. And if it does go that way, where will they go?

Back at the craft shop I gathered up an arm full of knitting; a jumper for Ella, a matinee jacket for Dan and Cathy’s new baby back in Bolton, a couple of scarves.

“Sorry love, it’s cash only” said the old lady on the till. “We don’t accept plastic”.

Chopperdoc - Orange

I don’t know what I expected from the Rotary Club’s Sunday markets out here in Orange, but I’d say the term market was pretty generous in the circumstances because it was more of a car boot sale really, various country folk selling their clutter from the boots of their beat-up Toyotas in the underground car park at the big K-Mart store.

One man hung out of the driver’s side of his car wearing an anorak so dirty you’d swear he’d dragged it from the local tip; one hand on the steering wheel, one hand feeding a bottle of milk to a baby parked up in his pram. And just as it dawned on me I’d like to turn and run in the opposite direction, Ella decided she loved it and went tearing around pushing and pulling at all sorts of filthy old toys until I had to bargain with her and part with a dollar for a matchbox car from an old couple who ticked her under the chin and said “our daughter would love you”.

“You see Ella” I said as we walked off, “All this whingeing and whining you’ve been doing - you could go home with some of these people – how would you like that?”

Ella’s doing her very best to get herself listed her for auction on E-bay right now because, not content with starting the day at 5.30am, she’s also taken to waking four or five times during the night, which means Darren and I are like the living dead. Today she climbed on me for an entire four hours between 5.30am and 9.30am and barely stopped making demands long enough to draw breath. Eventually I gave up and called for back-up from The Wiggles DVD after Darren had gone to work.

This afternoon we went down to the Chopperdoc base to see the helicopter, which Ella pretended to fly. The chopper in Orange is on standby during daylight hours; the response time from taking a phone call is five minutes between the start of the call and taking off from the helipad and all of the calls are what they call primaries, which means the chopperdocs are first on the scene at the incident (and I can tell you it’s the oddest feeling when you hear the helicopter coming back into base over the hotel and you realise that’s Darren coming home from work - a bit different from hearing the key in the door).

This is all very different from the International chopperdocs, who fly in planes to retrieve patients who’ve already been assessed and stabilised by other doctors overseas, though the sort of medical kit they carry is the same.

The situation here at Orange means you’ve got a doctor, paramedic, pilot and aircrew man all sitting around the hangar between 7.50am and 6.15pm, potentially doing nothing, though they can’t leave the building, which I’m sure is frustrating for them but not half as frustrating for me dealing with Ella for 13.5 hours without even a five minute break, in this case, in a hotel room without cooking facilities.

And then there’s the grey area of what happens if a call comes at say, 5.45pm. Well, if that happens, they fly the helicopter to the scene and stabilise the patient with whatever medical equipment they’ve got, then the aircrew fly back to Orange and the doctor gets abandoned into the hands of the road ambulance service and they drive the patient to hospital. So while Darren officially works the daylight hours, in fact his shift can finish much later than this, which is exactly what happened this evening because the batphone rang at 5pm. The doctors have to accept that’s how it works, but personally I find it difficult to accept he doesn’t get paid for the hours he’s away from home because, even though it’s not the way the NHS does things, it’s exactly what happens in all other Australian hospital jobs, where the docs complete a weekly timesheet and receive penalty rates for anything over and above the hours they’re contracted to do.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen, the most important piece of kit in the hangar is the gas barbeque; a piece of equipment I’ve seen everywhere Darren’s worked (including in the hospital’s intensive care unit). As Darren pointed out today, the BBQ is so important in the aussies’ psyche that, well, it’s a case of to hell with the safety rules, the BBQ comes before all human life. Never mind all the combustible materials in the cupboard, get the steaks on, mate. Good on ya.

The School Fete

Never let it be said I don’t get right into the thick of things because faced with an afternoon in this little country town I saw no better way of blending in than to attend the local school fete (2-7pm, sausage sizzle, wine tasting and fancy goods auction).

We parked outside on the main road and for a moment I hesitated because all I could hear were the strains of Tammy Wynette coming across the public address system, but I’d promised Ella some face painting so I decided I’d brave it because afterall, it wasn’t like I was going to bump into anyone I knew.

The fete turned out to be a hit with Ella, though there was a brief moment of tension by the cake stall when I decided I really ought to go home with the last remaining plate of lamingtons because a woman in a nylon housecoat had the same idea and beat me to them by literally inches. I was a bit put out, as you can imagine, though quickly came to my senses and realised life’s too short for lamington-rage and anyway, if that’s what three days in a country-town has reduced me to, it’s time I went back to the city.

So Ella got her face done and won two jars of goodies on the fishing stall and I got a cup of Toby’s Estate coffee (the stuff they serve at Toby’s shop in Sydney, though the poor woman at the school fete didn’t have a clue what I was saying when I ordered a skinny decaff flat white because she replied “sorry, it’s just ordinary black coffee”).

Just a pity Darren missed out on all the fun (he’ll be gutted, I know). There were plenty of kids dressed as superheroes today and if he’d asked me nicely, I’d have got his face done up like Batman as well.

Sin City

Having worked out that we’d already done much of what Orange has to offer, Ella and I decided we’d make like the locals again today and find out what it would be like to live in a so-called country town.

This morning I drove her out to the adventure playground ten minutes north of the city, which is an amazing little wooden playground funded by various organisations but built entirely by the local community and maintained with a degree of respect I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a park before.

At the playground, almost every mother I met started a conversation with me, including a gypsy woman with eight children (none of whom appeared to have their own teeth), and a woman who was attending a farewell party for a family who are moving to Perth; a family with the same surname as us, which kind of got me thinking they’d opened up a vacancy.

Afterwards, we drove back down to town and signed into the ex-serviceman’s club as guests, where Ella ate half a plate of bangers and mash and wore the rest of it on her clothes. The fact I’d turned up alone with a child sent everyone rallying round, “you know there’s a ramp for your pushchair over there” and “I’ll carry your tray for you”, which I found astonishing.

And when we were queuing at the bar, one of the local woman heard my accent and asked where I was from.

“Oh I know some other people from that part of the UK” she said. “They came out here to work because they were offered jobs and now they’ve got to decide whether to stay here or ship off to Sin City. The minute I heard your accent I knew you must be from near them. I’m Nicole by the way”

The reference to Sin City made me smile because that’s the Melbournians’ term for Sydney. They share a bitter rivalry, as I think I’ve told you before.

And then she started fishing about in her bag and pulled out her business card.

“Look, if you ever do consider living here, and I hope you do because we’d appreciate people with skills like yours, well I can put you in touch with the British people I know – their child’s about the same age as yours. I’m sure they’d help you out, even if it’s jut a chat on the phone to find out what their experience of living in Orange has been. Here’s my number, so call me if you need anything at all”.

“Thanks” I said. “I just wish I’d found you in Sin City. People like you are pretty thin on the ground”.

Orange City

The start of another weekend and Batman’s gone off working a shift at the chopperdoc base in Orange, which means Ella and I have a whole weekend to fill.

I was really looking forward to seeing Orange because the Sydneysiders rave about it, describing it variously as beautiful, pretty or quaint, depending on what mood they’re in. And the guide books rave about the architecture and the way it’s laid out on a grand scale with European-style parks and wide boulevards.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place and yes, it has a few old buildings, but if they’re raving about Orange, they’d just drop dead over something like the Cotswolds or Bath or even Chester because as far as I can tell, Orange has a couple of churches, a little town hall, a post office with regency-style columns and a theatre that looks like something you’d find at the end of Brighton pier. And after that it’s back to corrugated iron and concrete block, though admittedly the roads are wide and the cherry blossoms blooming either side give the place a British sort of feel that I haven’t noticed anywhere in Sydney.

There are a few other things that strike me about Orange. The first is the fact that almost all the residential buildings are detached houses on large plots and most of the ones around the city centre are in the classic federation-style like the ones in the first two pictures (federation-style refers to houses built around 1901, which is when the Australian states joined together to establish a larger federation and become all one country. The style varies slightly but they usually have high ornate ceilings and deep skirting boards and some sort of open fireplace). I haven’t seen a single apartment block, unlike in Sydney.

And if you drive a bit further out, you come across all of these little housing estates, a bit like the ones we build in Britain, though they somehow look twice as bad when you’re approaching them because the houses are almost all single storey and most of them have corrugated iron rooves which shine under the sunlight. The overall effect looks like a load of great big sheds stretching into the distance, though the individual houses themselves aren’t bad (bottom photo) depending on your attitude to vertical blinds and teenagers in green and gold shorts mowing the lawn using sit and ride mowers, like some sort of utopian vision.

Secondly, the women in Orange are an entirely different breed from the women in Sydney, so in the last three days I haven’t seen one Bugaboo pushchair, nor have I seen a single pair of designer sunglasses or anyone who looks as though they starve themselves thin 364 days of the year (in fact, quite the opposite as it appears you’re nobody in Orange until you’ve got a decent muffin top concealed under your skivvy, probably something to do with all the food and wine they produce out here).

And the only person clutching a take-out coffee has been me, which would make me very much the city mother if it weren’t for the muffin top helping me blend right in.

And then there’s the traffic, or lack of, and the fact you can actually find somewhere to park that’s not underground, and you don’t have to pay for it either. And you can also turn right at junctions, almost without exception. In retrospect, it’s no wonder the Sydneysiders have road rage is it?

Anyway, the most noticeable thing is that the people here in Orange actually talk to you; people passing on the street make a fuss of Ella, farmers tending their crops wave as we drive past and not only do they notice that we’re British, they’re interested in our Britishness and want to know exactly where we’re from and how we come to be in Orange of all places.

In Gloria Jean’s coffee house, for example, I dropped my purse while engaging in a conversation that the girl behind the counter actually started because she’d noticed I was British, and immediately a man appeared offering here, let me get that for you, which really took me aback.

“So if you’re living in Sydney, I’m guessing you have a frequent sipper card” said the waitress before taking my money, referring to the card you get stamped in Gloria Jean’s every time you buy a coffee (buy ten, get the eleventh one free). “I used to live there myself. The Sydneysiders are all frequent sippers”

“Yeah” I replied, leafing through my purse to find it, “they drink a lot of coffee in Sydney and I’ve kind of got the habit”

(And then she had a quick look at my card before she stamped it, just to check out which suburb I bought my coffee in. Once a Sydneysider, always a Sydneysider).

“Oh the Randwick branch” she observed, “that’s a nice suburb”.

“And not one I can really afford to live in” I said. “I haven’t got the right pushchair for Randwick”.

She smiled back and checked out my engagement ring, you know, like they do.

Until we came here, I hadn’t realised how unloved we feel in Sydney, because for the last eight months, I’ve had the distinct feeling that nobody there gives a toss about us, unlike the tourists, who always come away with the impression that the city’s people are so friendly (of course they’re friendly – you hang around Darling Harbour paying top dollar for average food and buy Ugg Boots for $289 at Circular Quay – they love you).

Our cause hasn’t been helped by the fact we’re only there for a year because once people realise you’re a temporary fixture, they can’t really be bothered to invest their time in making friends with you. Being in Orange reminds me that we’d have had a very different experience of Australia if we hadn’t lived in Sydney, something we’ve talked about quite a lot because there have been times we’ve wondered whether we did the wrong thing; perhaps we ought to have gone elsewhere, somewhere we could have afforded a house with a pool, somewhere we’d have made friends more easily, lived in a real street with real neighbours, not an apartment complex full of young professionals and other people just passing through.

The problem was, Sydney was the itch we came here to scratch; the place we couldn’t stop thinking about. So now we’ve scratched that itch, we’ve got another one and it’s called what if we’d lived somewhere else? The question is, how the bloody hell do we scratch that one?

Prospectors

And then we drove down another steep dusty track, where we came across Max and his wife, real prospectors in a real goldmine, though it was all a bit Beverly Hillbillies and I couldn’t help thinking come listen to my story ‘bout a man named Ged while we talked to them, a conversation which lasted as long as it took Ella to snaffle the emergency jelly snakes I had in my pocket for exactly a situation like this, a situation where we need her to stop whining and let us listen to somebody else.
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Now forgive my cynicism, but I don’t reckon Max is the most astute businessman I’ve ever met, though he does look the part with that hat and his dirty fingernails and eyes so bloodshot from the dust that you can barely make out the whites. But then he’s bought this bit of land and set up his goldmine and for a start they’re using blunt tools, the sort his employee is showing off in the photo (and both employees look like they’re fresh out of a correctional facility).

And secondly, he’s getting quite old, which means he’s more than a bit deaf and I had to repeat my name three times to stop him calling me Dana. And when he did get my name right, he reminded me that Sarah’s a biblical name because Sarah is the wife of Abraham; the second brush I’d had with Jesus today and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

Anyway, the whole lot of them were stark raving mad. Max said he’d show us around the mine provided we pretended to be investors and not tourists because “I’m not licensed for tourists”.

“Have you been in this sort of work long?” I asked one of the blokes on site.

“No. Never done it before”

“And you reckon there’s much gold to be found?”

He looked dubious. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I suppose” was his reply. “We’ve literally just started up, got a truck full of stuff parked over there. We’ll start washing it later and see what we find”.

Max was keen we stayed for lunch in the dining room, so keen he asked us four times, though I think it had more to do with the fact he’d found out Darren was a doctor and wanted some sort of medical opinion, a situation Darren often faces. He even offered us the use of their toaster, which is more than any Sydneysider has offered us in eight months, but Ella wasn’t really in the mood for lunch in a corrugated iron tent, so we made our excuses and buggered off back up the hill.

“Well Max, I hope it pans out for you, if you see what I mean” I said. Looking at the set up, I don’t feel optimistic about their chances, but I’ll be watching the news for a breakthrough just in case.

Pioneers

After Mount Canobolas we drove north-east from Orange towards Ophir, which is where Australia’s first goldfields were found in 1851, leading to one of the first gold-rushes on the continent. It’s a bit of a rough road across the countryside and typically, there’s no real warning of this because folk out here do it tough, and that includes the driving.

On reaching Ophir we found an old pioneers’ cemetery up on a hill, which still had three or four graves we could make out. Travelling priests had accompanied the prospectors out to the gold fields and they’d even built wooden churches, though there’s nothing remaining of them now.

Historians are unclear how many people are buried here, but one thing they’re sure about is that some of them met quite violent deaths because they were always squabbling between themselves. Charles Corse here, for example, was shot following a dispute over the ownership of a saddle.

Anyway, it’s petty dusty work getting up here to Ophir and I don’t reckon we can put off washing the car much longer, though it’s given us a whole new way of saying hello to the folks back home. You’ll be glad to know that people all across the central west of NSW are now wondering Where the bloody hell’s Warrington?

Mount Canobolas

This morning we drove out of town and up to the lookout at Mount Canobolas; 3,000 feet above sea level, which is high enough to see the curve of the earth and cold enough to require a good heavy coat.

The drive out to Canobolas takes you through the farmland on the outskirts of town, where they grow olives and vines and all sorts of fruit from strawberries to mangoes. There are whole stretches of road out here that look so much like country roads in Britain that your mind is completely confused by the surroundings and you begin to imagine there will be a pub around the next corner; a Fox and Hounds or a Dog and Partridge, and perhaps next door to that, a farm selling fresh eggs with an honesty box at the front gate.

The odd thing is, unless you’re here for the farmers’ market on the second Saturday of the month, it’s quite hard to actually buy any of this local produce because they don’t seem to be selling it on the farms, just in selected local stores on a list you can get in the tourist information office in town, and who’s got the energy to go to those sorts of lengths for half a dozen eggs?

Anyway, we did find the Mountain Tearooms at the base, which turned out to be something of a religious experience. We might not have found any eggs, but we did find Jesus amongst the picnic benches and let’s face it, there’s nothing like a rousing chorus of abide with me at half ten in the morning to remind you you’re alive.