My wife (Engogirl) and I went to Newcastle for the long weekend holiday (Queen’s birthday). Although Newcastle is only about 150kms north of Sydney, it was until this weekend, terra incognita to both Engogirl and I, so we thought we’d make ourselves familiar with the city over the holiday period.

Newcastle is the sixth largest city in Australia with a population of just under 290,000 and it is the largest coal exporting harbour in the world. The fact that Newcastle is a mining town had put me off going there for so long and I suspect that many other people in Sydney have shared my misgivings about going there. As it turns out, Newcastle is a real gem of a city as it’s very cycle friendly, has excellent beaches that are walking distance from downtown and the people are very friendly.

The funny thing about everyone I met in Newcastle, who I told that I thought they lived in a beautiful place, is that they all said the same thing; “shhh! Don’t tell anyone”.

As the sun was going down while we were walking around the city, we came across the old Newcastle Oceans Baths Pool and this is where we met Danny and Angus.

Danny was out walking Angus, a friendly English Staffordshire terrier (not to be confused with American Stafforshire terriers also known as pitbulls). Like the rest of the people in Newcastle we met, Danny was very affable and easy to talk to and he told us about how the pool had a mosaic of the world under the sand that had filled the pool during a large storm years ago.

The light was turning that magic gold that advertisers love to use to sell cars, life insurance or superanuation plans, so I asked to take a few shots. Afterwards, Danny said that if I liked this pool, I should check the next one nearby as it was a beauty. So I did and I’ll put my shot of it in my next post.

When I was in my early 20s I read the book, “On the Road”by Jack Kerouac and when I finished it I thought to myself, “what was all the fuss about?” So the guy did a bit of hitchhiking and hung out with a few other young guys.  It didn’t sound like a big deal to me and by the time I had read the book, I’d already travelled extensively; hitch hiked tens of thousands of kilometres; come under mortar fire in a war zone and worked in the carnival as a laser light show operator. 

“On the road” just seemed very tame to me. 

I had a similar feeling when I saw the much hyped movie “The Motorcycle Diaries”about Che Guevara travelling around South America with his friend by motorcycle. Some of my friends had raved about the movie and I can remember when I watched it, thinking to myself, “hrumph! So what! A couple of guys from well-off families go on a motorcycle trip, big deal!” To top it all off, nothing really happened.

Sometimes I feel so disconnected with most of the people that I share society with by the differences in our life experiences. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel superior, just different. It always amazes me when I talk to people and they tell me about how they lived in the one place, went to the same school and have only had a few jobs all their lives.  I almost envy people who can say that they have a hometown or they refer to, “my” high school.

Every time I see a TV show with that old trope about the high school reunion it’s like I’m watching some strange ritual being performed by an exotic tribe from a strange faraway land. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to still have friends from high school. I went to six primary schools (I was expelled from one), three high schools, two colleges and one university.  Because I’ve moved around so much as a kid, it hasn’t been a big deal for me to just walk away from friendships that I have made and begin new ones very easily.

In short, I’m what my wife (Engogirl) describes as an over stimulated jaded piece of meat.

The whole idea of having a career is such an alien concept to me that it’s almost unimaginable.  The reason why I find it so hard to get my brain around the concept of a career is that I find it difficult to understand how somebody’s attention can be held for so many years doing the same thing.  I usually do things (with the exception of photography) for about five years before I move on to something else.  Most jobs I’ve had, with one exception, have only lasted about a year or two.

I suppose, ”recalcitrant dilettantism” would be a suitable description of my chosen career path.

Here’s a short list of some of the jobs I’ve done, starting with part-time jobs I had at night in high school.

Newspaper boy.  Bus boy.  Waiter.  Kitchen hand.  Door-to-door salesman. English (as a second language) teacher in Cambodia and Japan.  Worker in a tractor factory (only did that for about two months because it just sucked so badly).  Pizza maker.  Ceramics slip caster. Mouse racer (a carnival job). Laser light show operator. Set builder in the theatre. Camera salesman. Photographic assistant in a large studio. Photographic lab manager. Outdoor equipment store manager.  I now fake it as a designer (sets, websites, graphics) in my own little business. 

Now that I’m married, live in the suburbs and own a house, my life is so totally different to what it used to be.  If you were to ask some of my older friends what I was like before I met Engogirl 13 years ago you would hear adjectives like, party animal, lunatic, dangerous, trouble. I’ve even had some friends tell me that they thought I was going to be the first person in our social circle to die because I was so reckless. All my friends feel that Engogirl has civilised and calmed me down.

Before I met my wife I used to rock climb quite a bit and most of my friends were people like myself. Rootless drifters living on the fringes of decent society working only because they were saving enough money to go on their next trip.

Two weeks ago Engogirl and I went to her parent’s holiday home down in Tallong and when we were down in that area (the Southern Highlands) we dropped in on an old friend of mine, Peter, and his wife Simona.

In the picture above of Peter and his wife you will notice that there is a framed advertisement (for Bonds clothing) behind them that has a red shirted young man sitting on a chopper. The young blond haired dude is Peter in his early 20s. He was quite the chick magnet in his day and when I used to work with him I noticed that quite a few women still found him attractive.

I first met Peter about 15 years ago when I was the manager of an outdoor equipment store and he was a customer. At that time Peter used to live in a tent for about 4 or 5 months of the year down in the snow country so he could spend his time with his girlfriend (at the time) skiing.  When Peter wasn’t skiing he used to install television cable systems in hotels and live aboard other people’s boats minding them for them.  After spending a couple of seasons skiing, Peter moved back up into Sydney and started to work in the store I managed.  It was during this time that we worked together that I heard about Peter’s life.  He had travelled extensively and he used to have a yacht charter company in Sydney Harbour with several yachts and he owned a block of apartments until he lost it all in a divorce.  Although Peter wasn’t too keen about the idea of losing so many assets, he was quite philosophical about it all, telling me that he felt that his life was getting far too complicated and stressful and that it was all probably for the best. Every now and again Peter would supplement his income by delivering yachts up the coast to Queensland.

Peter stayed on in the outdoor equipment industry for another couple of years and in his spare time he built a catamaran and lived on it in Sydney Harbour. About five years ago Peter met Simona and they were married within about a year.  It was always really obvious to me that life in the city working in a normal job never really suited Peter. A couple of years ago Peter and Simona moved down to the Southern Highlands to a town called Wingello.

Friends of mine had told me that Peter had moved into a yurt and because I had known Peter so long I assumed that he built himself a large round circular tent in the style of the Mongols, like what I’d seen at the Kyrgystan pavilion at the 2005 Expo in Aichi Japan.

It certainly wouldn’t have surprised me.

I didn’t have an address for Peter but I knew that if I asked the people in the only store in Wingello where he lived they would know because he is such a sociable character they would be bound to know him. Sure enough they did and they gave us directions to his place, finally saying, “he lives in the yurt and you can’t miss it”.

I have to be honest and admit that I was a bit disappointed to see that Peter was actually living in a solid house. Aparently, such octagonal houses are known locally as yurts.

Peter now makes a living as a local handyman and Simona owns and runs a little junk shop.

Peter and Simona bought the “yurt” in an unfinished state and when we arrived they were in the middle of laying beautiful travertine marble tiles on the floor. The bottom floor has all the shared living areas and there is a circular staircase in the centre that goes up to their bedroom. I was told that they wanted their house to be like the inside of a lighthouse and that they were also seeking permission to add another story on top of their bedroom to make their house look even more like a lighthouse.  I knew it was pointless to point out the fact that they lived 100 km from the coast.

Who cares anyway?

Nothing about Peter is ordinary and he has absolutely no time for conventions of any kind. Having said that, Peter is a lesson in conviviality and capability. He is always surrounded by a tribe of friends and he seems to be capable of manifesting anything. 

One of the main reasons why I like Peter is that he makes me feel normal. Nothing that I have done in my life seems different or extraordinary when I am with Peter.

My wife (Engogirl) and I went both scuba diving and snorkelling on the Great Barrier reef last month.

I learnt how to scuba dive years ago and to tell the truth, I never really thought it was any better than snorkelling. Scuba is interesting in that it’s a bit like flying. You aren’t restricted by gravity to the ground. When you want to go down, you merely swim down and when you want to go up, all you have to do is swim up. all very effortless and it’s a bit like being like a bird except the medium which you pass through is much denser and you can’t breathe it.

Engogirl wanted to try scuba diving so when we went out to the reef, we both did an introductory course (I hadn’t done any scuba diving since the mid 1980s). 

My wife was very underwhelmed by the experience as not only did she think that there wasn’t as much to look at the bottom (the reef is mainly in about 10 metre, which is about 31 ft, deep water), she also felt that the noise of the breathing apparatus and the bubbles it made, detracted from the experience. In short she felt it wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with all the equipment and she’d rather just jump in the water to snorkel.

Before we left on our trip we bought a very cheap and consequently low quality underwater camera (a Vivitar 6200W). It’s fixed focus and it can make little low-res movie files. We were a bit disappointed with the lack of sharpness and poor colour rendering. The digital screen was next to useless and basically we pointed the thing and just hoped for the best. The only good thing about the camera was that it was waterproof to 10 meters (which we took it down to).

The nice thing about snorkelling is that it’s very simple and far less dangerous. No hassles with having to be careful with surfacing to avoid the bends and no time limits. Another plus is the gear is way cheaper and far more simpler.

Scuba gear isn’t that necessary on the reef because most of it is in shallow water and the colours look better closer to the surface. 

There were some very keen scuba divers on the boat we went on and I scared one while I was snorkelling by diving down to her depth (about 8 meters or about 26 feet) and swimming under her. She sure didn’t expect to see someone without scuba gear at that depth.

The only advantage of scuba, that I could see, in the area we dived in was that one could take their time taking photos. Trouble was that the further down you go, the duller the colours become. If you use a flash to bring back the colour, you’ll illuminate the particles in the water and you’ll get lots of lightly coloured, out of focus dots in your shot. Unfortunately for us the coral had spawned a few days before we arrived and there were lots of small particles in the water. The crew on the boat seemed to enjoy telling us that we’d be swimming in coral spooge.

There’s no doubt it, the Great Barrier Reef has plenty of fish to see and it’s quite easy to get fairly close to them.

 We saw some quite large fish such as a 1.5 metre (about 4′ 6″) shark and a very large Maori wrasse (almost 2 metres or about 6′6″). Both fish were big enough to make me think twice about getting closer and I didn’t get any pictures of them.

By the second day Engogirl had found the perfect snorkelling combination; a stinger suit and a noodle.

Stinger suits are designed to protect the wearer from stings of the irukandji jellyfish and sunburn. The noodles are a long closed cell foam cylinder that provide floatation. I stuck with my lightweight wetsuit.

Engogirl spent most of her time taking little movies with our camera while floating on the surface. I’ve cobbled a little movie together of Engogirl’s first efforts at filming. If you’d like to see the movie, click here.

Most people who visit Cairns have no idea that although it is right on the coast, it doesn’t really have a beach. Cairns has dark, sticky, smelly mudflats instead. Not only do the mudflats only gradually slope off into the water, requiring a slog of hundreds of metres (yards) through the stinking ooze to water deep enough to swim in, there are sometimes also salt water crocodiles (the worlds largest crocs) out there that think that people are on the menu.

Tourists fly in from all over the world to Cairns which is the hub for trips to the Great Barrier Reef and they come looking for what Australia is famous for; beaches. Trouble is that Cairns has no beach that anyone with any sense would swim at so the local council has built a large salt water pool that is known as “The Esplanade Lagoon”, which backs up to the seawall that separates the city from the mudflats.

Although crocodiles are very dangerous and there have been a few attacks around Cairns there is usually only one death a year, on average, attributed to them nationally. To put things into perspective, bees kill three people a year here in Australia.

Whenever I see scenes like the one in the photograph below, that I took at Sawpit Creek in September this year, it puts me on edge.

Kangaroos can seem to be so benign.  Let’s face it, they look so cute and harmless.  For the most part that is the case, but I know from personal experience that things can change very quickly and with absolutely no warning that all. 

As you can see in this next photograph the kangaroo is holding the little girl’s hand in place as she feeds it so she wouldn’t go away and it wouldn’t let her go until all the food was gone.

The kangaroos in the photographs with the girls are immature Eastern Grey Kangaroos (Macropus giganteus). A fully grown male grey kangaroo can grow up to about 6 feet tall. Red kangaroos (Macropus rufus) can grow over 6 feet tall and the largest of the kangaroos.

I had an experience up in Queensland at the Currumban Wildlife Sanctuary, with a smallish immature grey kangaroo years ago. It was just sitting in a field and I walked up to it and it made no movement as I came closer.  When I was within about a metre (about yard) of it, it reached out to me with its paws.  So I reached out my hand and touched it on the paw, to which it just raised its paw and touched me back on the hand.  This little exchange repeated itself several times until without warning the kangaroo leant forward to place its paws on the ground, bringing its back feet forward to come closer to me. It then leaned back on its tail and, BANG!!! It kicked me full force, fair and square right in the chest.

There was no warning.

No change of facial expression.

No growling.

No bearing of teeth.

I couldn’t believe with how much force it hit me, and it wasn’t even a fully grown kangaroo, but it had knocked me back about a metre.  To make matters even more disconcerting it leaned forward again to drag itself forward and leant back on its tail to wallop me again, BANG!!! I backed up another step, to which it just followed up with another kick to the chest, BANG!!!

Again, without warning.  

As I backed up another step I was starting to get a bit concerned as I couldn’t tell when the kangaroo was going to stop kicking me. Once again, the kangaroo dragged itself forward to wallop me again, BANG!!!

It was starting to get beyond a joke and I was starting to think I was going to have to punch it out. I took another step back and readied myself to get kicked again, but the kangaroo just went back to eating.  So, I can most assuredly inform you, dear reader, that those cute fluffy little kangaroos can turn on you without any warning at all. I was lucky because I was an adult and the kangaroo was a small one.

I think the reason why I was kicked, was because kangaroos spar a little with their arms before they get stuck in with their back legs and the kangaroo that attacked me may have thought I was going to fight it, so it got the first shot in.

I’ve met other people who’ve told me stories that didn’t end so well as mine.

Some friends told me recently about a couple they had met up in Queensland. The guy was an older Englishman and he had a Thai wife, and they’d been complaining to my friends that they had not seen any live kangaroos. They went on to say that all the kangaroos they ever saw were road-kill by the side of the road.  My friends thought that they would have a bit of sport with these foreigners, so they told them that they weren’t dead kangaroos by the side of the road, but kangaroos that were asleep. These friends of mine then told me that at a few days later, they saw the couple again and they were covered in deep lacerations. When they saw the state of the foreigners, they asked them what had happened to which they were told that they had been driving along a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere when they saw a kangaroo lying by the side of the road. The husband thought it was dead and told his wife not to worry about it but she insisted on him stopping the car and getting out to investigate.  Apparently, she picked up a stick as she came closer to the kangaroo and poked it to see if it was alive. Quick as a flash, the kangaroo was up and grabbed a hold of her with it’s upper arms and leant back on it’s tail and started trying to disembowel her with it’s back legs. The husband ran to help to help his wife, and the kangaroo gave him a kicking as well. They were pretty unlucky as it’s very hard to sneak up on a kangaroo.

Here’s a video to show how unpredicable kangaroos can be.

In area where kangaroos are hunted you can’t get anywhere near them.

Usually kangaroos in groups are known as mobs. A mob of grey kangaroos can be up to about 30 individuals. Usually, the females and the young eat in a group surrounded by males that usually lay on the grass and keep an eye out for predators. 

Another time in Queensland, I was out taking photographs in a field near the Glasshouse Mountains, when I unexpectedly came across a large mob of grey kangaroos. I had just walked up the river bank over a small rise, and suddenly I was within about 3 m (about 9 feet) of a very large male lying in the grass. It didn’t get up but it turned around to look at me right in the eyes and then it flexed it’s muscles in it’s upper body (to illustrate what happened I’ll show you two photos that I took last weekend). 

As it flexed a few other males bounded a little bit closer to me and started flexing their upper bodies as well.

It was as though I had been sized up, and they knew they could take me.  They certainly weren’t scared of me, and after the experience that I had before with a small kangaroo; I wasn’t going to take any chances, so I beat a hasty retreat.

Just in case you think you’re “well ‘ard”, and that kangaroos aren’t a threat you can’t handle, check out this video.

As the video shows, kangaroos have plenty of heart and won’t back down so easily.

I’m fascinated by those old fashioned “big” things that are built for advertising purposes.

They are always so tacky and surreal but they interest me on several levels.

1. They always look so roughly made.
2. I always find myself thinking about the decision making process that led to them being built.
3. They are quite often very ugly.
4. I’ve never seen one that is associated with anything that is good.
5. They hardly ever look like they get maintained.

They are basically huge 3D billboards and as such I’m reminded of what that old wag Ogden Nash once said; “I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all”.

In short, “big” things seem to be monuments to the waste of resources and a lack of taste.

I lived in Vancouver for about three years, back in the early 1980s, and on the surface of things it looked like I had a good life. It’s a fairly picturesque place; I was making easy money as a freelance carpenter in the theatre and on television commercials; I was getting out into the outdoors often and to paraphrase Tom Waits, “I was getting more arse than a toilet seat“.

What more could a guy in his mid twenties want?

So why did I leave?

After travelling for a few intense years in Asia, I worked for another couple of years in America as a laser light show operator. My years in America had been one big blur of drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.  For a young man in his early 20s it was like a dream come true but after a while, the ennui of such a life began to pall.  By the time I went back to Canada it was a case of “done too much, much too young”, and I was having a hard time forming lasting relationships with the people I was meeting because I had so very little in common with them. 

Many of the young people I met in North America back then, seemed to be spending an awful lot of time high as kites, spaced out on sofas in dingy basements panelled in fake walnut veneer listening to Pink Floyd.

When I look back at that time and think about how I was relating to people, it reminds me of those wildlife documentaries about wolf society. The alpha male and female get to mate and have a great time, while everybody else stands around in a circle watching, wishing that they were in the centre.  I found that the average North American of about the same age as me at the time, was quite passive socially, in that they wanted to treat every situation as though they were watching a performance on TV.  They just sat and watched, immobile.

I’d get up and tell my stories to a rapt audience but there wasn’t really any two-way communication. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I had such a good time in the States when I was working in the laser show. It was like I was some kind of low-rent rock god and people wanted to know me, because of what I did for a living, not for who I actually was. Back when I was younger, I didn’t really care why people (especially women) liked me, as long as they did.

By the time I arrived in Vancouver I was so different from the people I was meeting. I was beginning to feel very disconnected.  Just about every social gathering I went to was fuelled by alcohol and drugs and often times ended up with me wobbling home with some strange woman I didn’t give a damn about other than for some ephemeral gratification.

It was at this time in my life that I discovered how empty, casual sex really was.  After one particularly party packed and eventfull month I ended up in the sack with yet another strange woman who I had met that day, and I found myself totally disinterested in the promised pleasures of her offered flesh.  As I lay there, I thought to myself, “what the heck am I doing here?” ”Who the hell is this person lying next to me?” For the first time in my life I got a sense of the complete “otherness” of another person.

I was also getting very sick of being high all the time. It seemed that everywhere I went the first thing that would happen was the marijuana would be taken out and a few joints would be rolled. It was just starting to get really crazy. Snowshoeing up in the mountains and half your party is sitting down in the snow tripping on acid incapable of taking care of themselves as the weather was changing for the worse. Lazing around naked on Wreck Beach with large groups of friends, all off their faces, high on magic mushrooms.  The party just went on and on and on.

One day I was sitting on a park bench, much like the photograph above, tripping on magic mushrooms with a new-found plaything, who happened to be a woman, when I looked down at myself. I noticed how threadbare my jacket was and I thought about how I had nothing to show for the last couple of years in Vancouver other than millions of slaughtered brain cells. And who was this woman on the bench with me anyway?

In a flash, I realised I had to get out of Vancouver, before I was destroyed by my own sybaritic nature.

Within a month I bought an old bicycle second-hand and cycled back down into the States to do a 2000 km bicycle trip.

But that’s a story for another time.