Rewards after a rainy day

And after all those days of rain, to be rewarded with such beautiful skies and colours, is simply awesome...

More Xmas cheer

Mieke sent us some photos today, taken during this weekend´s Christmas gathering, Beautiful photos, aptly encapsulating the lovely feel of the day.

H2O

And the rain keeps falling, falling, falling ... the Northern Rivers is making itself up for flooding ... mind you, more often than not these floods don´t actually happen, but they´re good stories. Ton was boasting of a 9m waterfall coming from his property (and showed us a photo as proof) but unfortunately by the time we got there, the rain had stopped and the sun even peeked around the corner of a cloud. As I´m writing this, the creek in the middle of the valley has burst its banks, but the cows don´t seem perturbed. Niki is chopping basil, Yarrow is cracking nuts, the cats are eagerly awaiting their dinner. The sky looks laden with more rain but apparently it will be moving away, making room for a drier spell. Fingers crossed.

Snakes alive...

Despite the Big Wet (which, compared to the real Big Wet in Australia - the monsoonal weather systems of the Northern Territory and North Queensland, is absolutely nothing but still annoyingly persistent) some critters are alive and kicking, as we witnessed driving down Houghlahans Creek Road, where Niki and I saw a beautiful carpet python cross the road. Slowly, deliberately, but not really much bothered about the car that skidded to a halt just centimeters from it to avoid killing it, it disappeared into the bush in an appropriately leisurely fashion. Carpet pythons are a much-loved pet in Australia, as you can read here.

Christmas 2010

Christmas Day we spent with Tess, Yarrow, Ton, Ellen, Mieke and John - we had a lovely, restful and scrumptious extended 8-course brunner (brunch, lunch, dinner all thrown into one) in excellent and relaxed company.

Thanks to the inimitable and combined cooking skills of Niki (chef par excellence and chief list maker), Yarrow (sous chef, meal planner, recipe researcher, sous list-maker and Mango Ice Cream producer) and Tess (maker of the menu, chief helper and fudge maker extraordinaire), as well as contributions of the salady kind from Mieke and Ellen, a scrumdumptious ham John had sourced from the local Clunes butcher - all this topped up with a Christmas fruitcake.

It was the taste of the fruitcake that really brought home the ´old country´ Christmas feel to Niki. As you will appreciate, Niki, like most people who ´transplant´ from Europe to Australia´s had a challenge accepting that, in fact, this is Christmas in Australia... palm trees dressed with Christmas tinsel, Santas in sleighs drawn by moo cows, shops that close at 5 o´clock, humidity and tropical warmth (despite the incessant rain).




Unfortunately, but not dissuadingly, it was A Very Wet Day - which started off with a swim in rain that was bucketing down. Very refreshing, and very good for my back, which has been playing up a bit; after that, food preparation mode was switched on, and didn´t get switched off till late afternoon.


Thank you all for making this first Christmas for Niki in Down Under an unforgettable one!

Review

Pre-Christmas it´s always nice to receive a review of one of one´s book - especially if it´s a good one ...

We´re getting ready for the Christmas weekend ... but the weather, unfortunately, doesn´t seem to be as promising: dark skies, rain ... not exactly what we had expected of this Australian summer...

Performance

A week or so ago, Tess and Yarrow, members of the Big Top performance troupe of the Byron Bay circus school, had their end-of-year performance. A few video impressions of their skillful and impressive achievement... Can you spot them?

Sticky situation

Remember the huge Stick insect we found on one of the windows the other day? I finally managed to access the photo - held against the size of Niki´s hand and a coin, it becomes clear just how huge it was...

Lucky 2

Avid blog readers may remember the post about Lucky, the baby Flying Fox. We found Lucky in his dead mother´s pouch the night after she fell out of the Moreton Bay Fig. Unfortunately, Lucky didn´t make it, despite excellent care by Wires.

The other day as Niki and I returned from the Goonellabah post office we noticed a wallaby on the side of the road. Being (by now) seasoned (though untrained) Wildlife carers, we stopped and checked to find definite movement in the pouch. So, again we were on the phone to Wires who picked the unfortunate mother up. A few days later we were informed the Joey (whom we had dubbed, of course, Lucky 2) hadn´t made it as it was immature. Niki and I have decided to register for a Wires course now...

Bad day turned good

The other day was one of those days that everything went wrong. And I mean absolutely everything, making me rather grumpy at times, until dear Yarrow presented me with a batch of self-made cupcakes with a message ... so sweet .... Can you decipher the message?

It´s been a while...

Oh dear. Another example of tempus fugit... A week has gone by, and many many centimeters of rain have fallen since I last wrote. The days are either hot and humid or wet and cool. A very strange summer for Australia, that´s for sure.

Niki and I have just come back from Yarrow's performance at the Carols on the Common event in Clunes (were it not for the fact that it became Carols in the Community Centre due to the incessant rain...). Yarrow gave a lovely performance, with a band called Bah Humbug this time, of Dreaming of a White Christmas. Unfortunately I can´t find the cables allowing me to upload videos and pictures, so I´ll do that as soon as I have retrieved them. (The same goes for Yarrow and Tess´ circus performance videos).

We´re slowly getting ready for Christmas when Tess, Yarrow, Ton, Ellen, Mieke and John will join us for celebrations - hopefully, but not likely, the sun will come out by that time.

New Zealand

Last week we spent a few days in New Zealand. Neither of us had ever really thought we´d go there: even though it proved only 2.5 hours away from Brisbane by plane, it still felt like The End of the Earth. We stayed with a friend of Niki´s, David, in Auckland.

Day 1 we spent largely in the fascinating Auckland Museum of Natural History, ´reading up´ on Maori history and New Zealand Natural history (which we will no doubt be able to use in our writing), enjoying a live Maori music show in which the performers also gave us a lot of information on their culture (see sample video below). You might think that spending a day inside in a land which abounds with natural beauty was perhaps an odd thing to do, but we came so unprepared that we felt we needed to tank up first on the background to culture and people - the museum is absolutely wonderful and we can recommend that anybody visiting Auckland go there.

Auckland is a peaceful city (Niki: ´Nobody lives here!´, which is what she has also claimed about Australia when she first arrived here...) - rush hour doesn´t really differ much from any other hour on the day. Architecture feels very Australian - lots of low-rise, a large variety if building styles, copious green - very peaceful and calming to the eye. Of course, the CBD itself is nothing but high rise, as any modern city these days but has still retained some of the Feeling of Yore.

What neither of us had realized is that the city, and basically the whole of New Zealand, is situated and built on a range of 40 or 50 volcanoes - none of which seem to be active, but then recent earthquake activity under Christchurch on the South Island showed that the inside of the Earth is constantly on the move and boil.

On day 2, which turned out to be quite a hot and sunny day, we ferried to one of the many islands that form Auckland and trekked up Rangitoto island which turned out to be a gorgeous two-hour walk up and down the side of this ´recent´ 600-700 year-old volcanic rock with wondrous vistas.

Maori culture within New Zealand is a different thing altogether from Aboriginal culture within Australia. Maori, despite the fact that the Maori, too, suffered at the hands of outsiders who, basically, came in and ´took´ their country (with whatever good intentions). But Maori were already an established , farming tribal but unified culture with one language by the time the British came in. They defended their rights and property in a series of conflicts until an agreement was reached with the occupiers and they have since completely integrated into and become part of what we now know as New Zealand culture.

There was energy, humour, cultural pride, fun, positivism and a constructive effort to share knowledge and emotion with the international audience in the performance - something I haven´t (yet) observed in any aboriginal dance and music performance I´ve seen in Australia. We´re aware of course that Aboriginal culture(s) under the settlers has suffered to a great extent and that we (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people) in Australia have a long way to go still.

Animales

Niki is fascinated by the wildlife around us, and is meeting, on average, a new animal every day. Just now I found her standing on our rock table in the back yard watching the evening sky for Flying Foxes on their dusk migration from the Booyong Rainforest Reserve to Alstonville.

Earlier this week we saw a (dead) stick insect, but today a live specimen had attached itself to the window on the front verandah. About 30 cms in length, it has sat there now for at least 18 hours without moving much. I took a photo, but it might as well have been a video ... It´s one of these beauties: the Titan!

Trees

And here´s the result of early morning Dressage Efforts... The photos are a bit fuzzy, but they give you a good idea of The Big Tree and the little ´un.

5 December

And lo, and behold, Sinter Klaas did come round - but he had left a message for those who might be impatient to wait and see. Because Sinterklaas does know certain animals in this household very well, and their predilection for sweets, so ...

When the rise of the teens was announced (´Dad? Good morning? - with expectant look of ´Can we go check our boots?´), quick redress of the situation was attained and the boots were magically filled. Including Niki´s Birckenstock slipper!

This annual events was followed by a lush breakfast with hot apple turnovers ... and then the girls felt that The Wait To Dress The Christmas Tree had been Long Enough, so an immediate foray was made into the Made In China boxes to address this issues.

Happy Sinterklaas! Erm, no, hold on - Merry Christmas!

Sinterklaas

On 5 December us Cloggies celebrate Sinterklaas. For information on this annual celebration click here. The evening of 4 December involves singing songs and putting some food ready for Sinterklaas´ white horse. Even though Tess and Yarrow are way past the age of Belief or even Suspended Disbelief, we still uphold this tradition. So with Niki (who had become increasingly fascinated by the Sinterklaas tradition, stories and seasonal foods) we sat down on the Day Bed, ate apple turnovers (baked by Tess and Yarrow) and sang Sinterklaas Kapoentje, Zie de wind waait door de bomen and other Golden Sinterklaas Oldies. Some food for Sinterklaas´ horse will be left in front of the fireplace, in the hope of some goodies tomorrow morning (for Tess and Yarrow, that is....). Below is a video clip of Sinterklaas´ traditional arrival in Holland on a steamboat from Spain, with his (yes, politically incorrect, but let´s get over that one) Black Pete helpers. It´s always a wonderful celebration for both children and adults (most of whom realize they would actually and dearly like to believe in the Saint...)



It is interesting that American Santa Claus is historically related to The Sint. ´

Sinterklaas is the basis for the North American figure of Santa Claus. It is often claimed that during the American War of Independence the inhabitants of New York City, a former Dutch colonial town (New Amsterdam) reinvented their Sinterklaas tradition, as Saint Nicholas was a symbol of the city's non-English past.The name Santa Claus supposedly derived from older Dutch Sinter Klaas. But the Saint Nicholas Society was not founded until 1835, almost half a century after the end of the war. In a study of the "children's books, periodicals and journals" of New Amsterdam, the scholar Charles Jones did not find references to Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. Not all scholars agree with Jones's findings, which he reiterated in a book in 1978; Howard G. Hageman, of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, maintains that the tradition of celebrating Sinterklaas in New York existed in the early settlement of the Hudson Valley. He agrees that "there can be no question that by the time the revival of St. Nicholas came with Washington Irving, the traditional New Netherlands observance had completely disappeared."

Irving's stories prominently featured legends of the early Dutch settlers, so while the traditional practice may have died out, Irving's St. Nicholas may have been a revival of that dormant Dutch strand of folklore. The Saint Nicholas Society of New York celebrates a feast on 6 December to this day.´(from Wikipedia).

Chairing the meeting

For a long time I´ve had two rather old chairs on my outside deck. Chairs which, when given half a chance, could no doubt tell a story or two, witnessed by their old and tattered looks. My love and I decided, when turning the house inside out and moving chairs and sofas around, to have them re-upholstered as a try-out for a bigger re-upholstery of a lounge set. Today, the result arrived - what a bit of TLC can achieve ...

Wildlife in Summer

It´s early December which, in Australia, means Summer. Well, it´s wet wet wet, grey, wet and grey, with the occasional sun peeking through and a rainbow here and there ... But animals don´t mind and them are multiplying: nests, eggs, little animals all over the place. A calf next door; 4 lorikeet eggs in an old stump; and over the past few days we observed a beautiful black and brown-orange bird mysteriously, and in quite a ´hushed´ manner, as if it was trying to subdue itself into not being there, stealing about the place with twigs and worms in its beak. It often lands at the side of the pool, does its foraging job and then hops / flies back to the lower paddock where it surreptitiously looks around, left, right, left, and then scuttles into the scrubs and weeds there ... Today a Google search confirmed that we have a Pheasant Coucal here, a pair in fact, nesting, breeding. The Coucal, as its name may phonetically betray, is actually a type of Cukoo, but this one has its own nest, and builds it on the ground. Have a look here. It´s a lovely bird, so we´re looking forward to little Coucals soon...