Pig

A lot of our recent posts seem to have something to do with animals - the Daily Animale, as Niki calls them. The other day we were driving back home from somewhere when we saw something through the dirty front screen of the car: we thought it was a dog but as we came closer it seemed like quite a big and oddly-shaped dog. As we passed it, we saw it was a big, black pig ... It must have escaped from the pig trucks that are forever trundling down this road to the slaughter house in Booyong. We haven´t seen it since, but it was quite an alienating experience...

Possum lair found!

Remember the possum we wrote about a week or so ago, who stealthily moved through the tea trees alongside the pool at dusk? Well, my love and I had been wondering for weeks where it lived. We thought it might live in the old camphor laurel. When Red rocked up today to do some work on The Bails, we had to have a peek in the attic and, lo and behold, there Mr or Mrs possum was, curled up under the eaves. We´re still sort of confused as to what route it takes at night, because it always ends up on the roof of the deck and waddles across the roof of the house to go into the Moreton Bay fig for a nocturnal feed. Niki also went up the ladder to have a look and took this cure photograph.

Anniversary!

On 2th of January my love and I celebrated our 2-year anniversary with a delicious meal at the Byron Bay Balcony restaurant. We had a lovely time, looking back on two fascinating years of love and laughter, of growing together, of journeying, of creating a family and a home. Thank you, my love.

Trix and Peter

Sometimes in our lives fate deals us a bad hand ... My good friends Peter and Trix are going through a tough time, with many health scares for Trix. Niki and I are with them in thought every day, although we´d like to be closer to them to offer support and a helping hand. For those who know them, too, send good thoughts!

Bridging

Today my love and I, accompanied by Tess, drove off to the Gold Coast again to the Department of Immigration to arrange the Bridging Visa which allow Niki to travel back to Portugal to do her work for the university in Lisbon. Thanks to the kind help of the staff there,  and a letter from the University confirming Niki´s contract, the visa was quickly arranged. While Niki and I are abroad the application for the partner visa will stay in place and be processed. Because processing times are between 6 and 9 months at the moment, it´s not likely that we´ll hear before we return. We´re looking forward to this being the last bridge...

Bats

A few nights ago my love and I decided to witness a rather special phenomenon which occurs here with daily regularity: every day around dusk hundreds of flying foxes trek into the valley, from the Booyong rainforest reserve down the road, from Alstonville, Fernleigh and other localities. We sat down, about twenty minutes before dusk, on the little bench next to the bonfire and waited for the cicadas to start their evening concerto, the kookaburras to burst out in laughter, and the skies to darken to an opaque red-grey hue. Suddenly, the flying foxes appeared out of nowhere, from all directions. Weeks earlier we had seen them flying in through the valley towards the big Moreton Bay fig in front of the house, but this time we saw them do their in-flight dances from close by, circling around the tree, cutting corners mid-flight, chasing each other in and out of the foliage, screeching and screaming. A beautiful sight.

Sunny side

Would you believe that for most of the last week, the sun has been out? On Wednesday we spent the day going up to the Gold Coast to visit (does one ´visit´ such a place?) the Department of Immigration Office in Southport to make inquiries about a Bridging Visa Niki needs. We came away with more information, and we need to go back this week to hand in some papers. The whole application may take 6-9 months... 

Anyway, the Bridging Visa will allow my love to travel back to Portugal on 9 February and come back to Australia by the end of May. It´s going to be a strange time, as I won´t be immediately traveling with her - I will fly to Portugal on 12 March, and we´ll spend 6  or 7 weeks together then. 

So, back to two time zones, Skype conversations, phone calls, text messages and emails  Neither of us is looking forward to this, but we also realize that it needs to be this way for a bit while Niki fulfills her duties lecturing at the university in Lisbon, and we know that it doesn´t take anything away from our committed relationship.

Talking of which ... on 26 January (four days from now), it´ll be two years! Even though it wasn´t until 8 March that we physically met, we´ve decided to celebrate 26 January as our anniversary... the start of our journey!

Just a worky update

One of my publishers, Macmillan, keeps a part of its website to introduce their authors to their clients. A fresh update of where I am at, can be found here.

Getting serious

As much of Queensland (and we´re talking areas the size of several European countries) flood, the rain in the Northern rivers doesn´t abate either. More storms and bad weather is predicted. Fortunately, it doesn´t look as if we will be badly affected here, but recent photographs of what is happening in Brisbane (a mere 2.5 hours North of here), tells you it´s getting quite serious. And yet, some people maintain their sense of Aussie humour, witnessed by the Brisbane resident who placed a Plan B bathtub in their garden... I just love that photo!

Dragons

We encountered another beautiful creature when my love and I had a quiet Sunday cup of chai and coffee at the Eltham pantry: two red-coated dragonflies, a fornicare in sky-born fashion, as they are want to, zoomed past and landed on some flowers.

Awesome

Rain, rain, rain ... Sorry to say that not more news can be forthcoming... We were just observing the other day that it has been raining solidly now since, what, early October? Sure, with the occasional sunny day, but still ... 

Anyway, that´s not going to stop some of the critters around us. It is the season of animal reproduction, and a day or two ago, we (almost literally) ran into the golden web of one of the many Orb spiders, and what a wonderful web she had weaved.  It was triangular and hung between the branches of a tree and a fenceline, about 2 metres long. Interestingly, we caught her (and an aspiring male) in the advent of sexual adventurousness ... the male perching himself precariously above her (OK, on the other side of the web, but oh so close to her deadly fangs and surely she would know the secrets of her web as she weaved it... ).  Isn´t the photo beautiful? (Taken with Niki´s new camera). Just to give you an idea: the male was approximately an inch long...

There are many Orb spiders, I found out when I started to research them on the web, including the terribly ugly but very impressive Garden Orb. If you are of an  arachnophobic bent you might not want to read this link. The setting we ran into is described in much detail, with lots of interesting background information. Worth a read.

New Year´s Day

 We thought it might be a good idea to spend the first day of the new year doing, well, nothing. It was also bucketing it down, s a visit to the beach wasn´t on, really. We ended up taking our friend Kat, who was staying with us for a few days, to Gold Coast airport, and stopping along the way in Brunswick Heads to have lunch with Tess, Yarrow, Byrony, Mieke and John at what locals know as The Brunsa. After lunch, despite precipitation, we briefly ventured onto the beach and got very, very wet...

Possum

On our evening swim we heard rustling in the bushes surrounding it. After initial suspicion that either Chicco or Malouf were on the prowl, we noticed an animal unlike cat or dog moving through the branches. We saw it had a long tail, but only discovered once back on the deck that we were dealing with a lovey possum... How cute is that?

Happy New Year!

For all of you whom we couldn´t speak to in person: Niki, Tess, Yarrow and I wish you all a wonderful 2011, with hope, health and happiness! We spent an enjoyable evening at Mieke´s and John´s who had built a lovely outdoor fire. As you can see, some of us danced the night away. From a distance, we watched fireworks go off in Byron Bay and Bangalow.

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...