I hope you all had a nice Christmas and an excellent new year!
As is usual, the time between Christmas and New Year’s day is packed with feasting and socialising. That’s my excuse for being slack with posting and I’m sticking to it.
Here in Sydney Australia it’s stinking hot right now and for reasons I don’t understand, I always get highly motivated to do major projects around the house at this time of the year. The smart time to do most of these laborious jobs would be in the cooler weather, but no, that would make too much sense. I never really feel like doing such things until it gets uncomfortably hot and humid.
Further proof that I’m a complete idiot.
Last year at about this time I landscaped the front yard in the blazing sun. This year I’ll be toiling in the backyard making a pond and replacing two toilet sets in the house.
The photo below is of Engogirl on the first day of this year, helping me with the construction of some bench seating that will surround the pond we are constructing.
After sweating our butts off for a day, we decided that instead of getting stuck into our backyard work and knocking it over quickly, we would rather get into an air-conditioned car and take couple of days off to visit Engogirl’s parents at their holiday home in Tallong (2 hours south of Sydney).
There are a few orchards in Tallong and stone fruits are in season. Engogirl’s father loves jam and makes his own.
Here’s Engogirl’s father’s recipe for apricot jam
Ingredients
Equal quantity of firm (slightly unripe) apricots and sugar. For the jam that was being prepared in the photo above, 1kg of apricots and 1kg of sugar were used.
Pectin (use only half the amount that is recommended on the packet or the jam will be too firm).
Water.
Glass jars.
Method
Place freshly washed jars with lids and sugar into an oven and heat up to 100 degrees C (which is boiling point at sea level or about 212 degrees F). The sugar is preheated so that it dissolves quickly and completely when it is added to the fruit. Wash, pit and halve the apricots. Place prepared apricots into a saucepan with a cup of water, then heat for about 15 minutes, until the fruit begins to soften, over medium heat.
When the fruit is soft add the sugar and pectin stir until dissolved. Bring the mixture to the boil and cook for about another 5 minutes, whilst continually stirring. You will know when the jam is ready to fill the jars when the jam mixture sticks to the side of the saucepan in thick blobs. When the mixture is ready, take the jars and lids out of the oven (don’t forget that they will be hot, so use oven mitts) and fill with the hot jam mixture and screw on the lids straight away. It’s probably best to perform this operation in your sink in case there are any spills or accidents.
What I want to cover in this article is the dynamics of being on a charter yacht for two days in the tropics.
About a month ago my wife (Engogirl) and I went up to Surfers Paradise to attend a conference on large dams. Engogirl had never been up to far north Queensland, and she wanted to go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I hadn’t been up to Cairns since I was about 14, so I was quite amenable to extending our trip by travelling up north by train.
A fact that many people aren’t aware of, is that the Reef is actually about 20 or 30 km offshore and if you want to visit it you will need some kind of boat. Because the Great Barrier Reef is such a well-known tourist destination, there are plenty of options to get out there for visitors wishing to go diving. There are huge catamarans that hold hundreds of people complete with a helicopter pads on top through to charter yachts catering to much smaller groups.
Due to the facts that my wife and I can’t stand large crowds of people and that it’s easier to go missing at sea on a large boat, we decided that a smaller boat would be more suitable. We booked tickets on a boat called the “Vagabond“, which is crewed by three people (captain, diving instructor and cook) with nine other passengers.
We boarded at about eight o’clock in the morning and straight away it was obvious that the cook (who I suspect was the captain’s girlfriend) and diving instructor didn’t get along. The cook (an American woman from Virginia) made it obvious that the diving instructor got on her nerves by snapping at him a few times about nothing, in front of us.
The diving instructor (Frank) was one of those happy go lucky guys that obviously has a great time, doing his work and chatting up any of the female punters who might mistake him for a legend. I’ve known plenty of guys like him. As matter of fact, a few of my friends have been trekking guides in Nepal and white water rafting guides, so I know what their headspace is like and I’ve heard all the stories about their gormless punter conquests. Unfortunately for our diving instructor, Frank, he was a German, and although he wanted to have fun and joke around, there was a little bit of cultural dissonance happening, which cruelled most of his attempts at humour. Which was a pity because he was a nice guy.
I’ve got real soft spot for Germans and there have been very few Germans that I’ve met, that I haven’t liked. I think that many non-Germans think that Germans are rude, because they are so direct. I’ll admit that it can seem confronting at first, but once you get used to the way how Germans interact, it’s a real pleasure to be able to relax and be so straightforward. No fragile sensitivities or gameplaying, just direct communication, and I love it.
It was an absolutely beautiful clear day with a good offshore breeze that allowed us to make good time (12 kn) under sail.
There’s nothing like being on a large yacht that has all its sails and spinnaker up in a good stiff breeze. To add to the general feeling that we were partaking in something special we were accompanied every now and again by pods of dolphins. It took us a couple of hours to get out to the reef, but by about lunchtime we were already in the water snorkelling.
About half the people on the boat where experienced scuba divers with their certificates. I on the other hand, learned how to scuba dive when I was 14 years old for $11 at a local YMCA with a high school friend of mine, Stephen. That was back in the bad old days, when they basically just said, “make sure that you exhale when you surface and don’t come up any faster than your bubbles”. Of course, things are very different nowadays and I couldn’t in all good faith tell the diving instructor that I was properly qualified to scuba dive. Never mind having to produce a certificate that would be recognised today.
Fortunately my shonky scuba certification and Engogirls girl’s complete lack of experience wasn’t an issue because the Vagabond offered an “introductory course”, which basically meant that the driving instructor went over the basics with every one and then escorted us on the dive, ensuring that we didn’t go any deeper than 10 meters (about 30 feet) and that we exhaled as we resurfaced slowly. I won’t talk any more about scuba diving and I will leave that for another post.
When a yacht is under full sail with a good wind, sailing can be sublime. Of course it’s not for everyone, because a good wind means that there is usually fairly choppy seas, and that means the boat leans over and goes up and down in a way, that people who aren’t used to it, may find alarming. I’ve been on various water craft on the ocean many times and I’ve never been sick, even in large storms. Although I’ve never been seasick, I know that it can strike anyone and I was a bit worried that I might get nauseous, and I was doubly worried about Engogirl because I wanted to her to have a great time. Luckily both of us didn’t even come close to getting sick, but one unfortunate passenger did. According to common wisdom, one can avoid seasickness by staring at the land or the horizon if there is no land in sight. Another strange thing about seasickness is that the nausea completely stops when the sufferer enters the water.
Strangely enough, it’s very hot and humid in the tropics. Since you can’t or don’t want to scuba dive or snorkel all day, you end up sitting in the shade on deck, sweating your arse off drinking. Being on a boat means that you can’t get away from the heat and humidity and your only relief is to jump on the water every now and again to cool off, then drink some more.
With such a small group, interpersonal dynamics are important. Most of the people on our trip were very nice (we met up with a couple from Mexico and Brazil who live in Sydney and we’ll be having them over for dinner this Friday), with the exception of an older surgeon (who’s wife was lovely) with an unfortunate god complex. He used to own a yacht charter business himself at Airlie Beach and he was the sort of guy that saw himself as the font of all knowledge. He constantly contradicted people. If somebody said black he’d say white. He was just ridiculous. I guess he was used to pushing a bunch of terrified underlings around without any comeback, and his personality had suffered as a consequence. So our little tin god held court in the cockpit and bored the shit out of me. Unfortunately the captain, who was quite capable at his job, seemed to be in his thrall and basically encouraged him to pontificate.
Another interesting thing was that none of the passengers smoked cigarettes but all three of the crew did. I asked the captain, ” what’s the matter, do you guys get too much fresh air?”
As the day passed, I found myself noticing how fatigued the crew looked. They go out as often as they can, day after day, without much time off. They go out for two days to come back in the afternoon, and then they have to clean up the boat ready for the next day’s group first thing, the next morning.
In such heat and humidity it was no wonder they looked so exhausted and jaded. The diving instructor was new to that particular boat, and he obviously hadn’t been ground down by the routine yet, but the captain and cook could barely disguise how, over, the situation they were. Constantly being out in the heat and humidity whilst having to make small talk with people they know they’ll never see again, must be completely draining. They were too busy to go scuba diving and snorkelling themselves (the captain said he hadn’t been scuba diving for over a year) and were constantly at everybody’s beck and call. I can completely understand why the captain seemed so disinterested and fake in his conversations, but I do wish he had have been a bit more professional and not shown it so openly. Then again, us Australians are like that in general.
The food on board, whilst being quite plain due to the fact that they have to cater to so many different palettes, was perfect, as it was mostly light and fresh salads with cold meats. One of the guests asked why they weren’t serving fish on board, to which the captain replied, ” we bring people out here to see the fish, not to kill them”. Then the captain went on to explain to us how much damage fishing does to the reef. Not only do the fish stocks get depleted, but the coral also gets damaged by boats dropping anchor in areas they are not familiar with. He had a very low opinion of sports fishermen and boats that took such people out onto the reef to fish. After having spent a little time diving on the reef, I completely agreed with him on that matter.
It was so hot and sticky all day, that nobody really spent any time in their dark tiny little cabins. Our cabin was up at the front near the head (boating talk for “toilet”), which was a drag because our cabin had two doors; one to open into the passageway, and one into the toilet. The toilet was shared by other people who could enter through another door.
During the night both of the head doors were to be left open because there was a hatch directly over the toilet that was left open to let fresh air in.
Much to our chagrin and disgust, we found out that our cabin was so hot at night, that we had to leave the toilet door open so we could get a small rank smelling breeze through to us. To make matters worse, when I asked the captain how to turn on the fans that were in our cabin (the switches didn’t seem to be working), he looked at me as though I had just asked him if I could have my way with his mother, and curtly replied to me, ” I’ll do it in a couple of minutes”. So went back to my cabin and lay in the sweltering heat, and waited for him for about nearly an hour. I figured he must have forgotten, and he looked so irritated when I asked him, I thought I’d probabley be better off asking the cook how to turn on the fans. She told me the captain hadn’t turned on the power to the fans that she would speak to him, and it should be sorted out pretty soon. Another half an hour passed on the fans weren’t turned on, so I went out and asked the captain again, if he could turn the power to the fans on.
He said he’d get right onto it.
It never happened.
I laid there fuming for hours. I was so angry thoughts of violence crossed my mind.
I was still angry in the morning, but I thought, that there was no point in kicking up a big fuss as I would be off the boat later on in the day and I might as well enjoy the rest of the trip.
The second day was calm and the wind had gone away. My wife and I spent the day snorkelling together, and all my anger at the captain just drained away as I enjoyed being in one of the most amazing places in the world.
After lunch, we headed back into Cairns, but unfortunately there was no wind and we had crawled back at a snail’s pace under power. Sailing is great, but motoring along in a sail boat sucks!
The sun just beat down on us, and there was no breeze to give us any relief. I was starting to think that one of those catamarans with a helicopter pad seemed like a great idea. I’m pretty sure that Engogirl and I would have been happy to spend a couple hundred dollars just to get off the boat. Again, I found myself thinking about the crew, and how they did this day after day. On the surface of things, it might seem to be a dream job, working on a charter yacht on the Great Barrier Reef, but I’m pretty sure that the nitty-gritty, salty, sweaty, stinky reality, would pall pretty quickly.
On the way back, I was chatting with the diving instructor (Frank), and he told me about some of the jobs that he had. He had worked in Mauritius and in Thailand at resorts before he’d come to Australia. Frank had said that there was a high burnout rate with diving instructors in Cairns working on the large boats. Apparently, the large boats work like assembly lines, with all of the different parts of the dives divided up amongst the various instructors. The multitude of divers on board are broken up into smaller groups, and there is one instructor checking their group’s gear on board, plus two more in the water, checking on the punters as they enter the water. Then there are two other drivers who act as guides for the groups.
It all sounded like an expensive nightmare to me.
By the time we got back into port, all of us couldn’t get off the boat fast enough. It was obvious that everybody had, had enough of the heat, and just wanted to go and have a shower and cool down. As we left, we were asked to sign the guest book and make a comment, so I wrote, ” it was hot….. in so many ways”. Later on in the day I found out it was one of the hottest days recorded.
Both Engogirl and I are glad that we went and dived on the reef before climate change completely destroys it, but would we do it again?
I spent about two years in South-east Asia travelling around in the tropics, I’ve been to Tahiti, Central America, Florida, Peurto Rico, The Virgin Islands and now that I’ve dived on the Great Barrier Reef, I can safely say that, “if I never visit the tropics again, it will be too soon”. Both my wife and I know we don’t belong in the tropics and it’s gotten to such a point that when I see those sandy beaches fringed with palm trees and clear blue skies all I can think of, is physical discomfort.
It was so good to go to an air-conditioned hotel to have a shower, cool down and have a decent nights sleep.
This article is in response to Robert Krzisnik’s article “Racism immunity?” on his blog.
Since federation in 1901 and up until the 1960s, Australia had an immigration policy known as the ”white Australia policy”. The white Australia policy was intended to keep the Australian population mainly Anglo-Saxon in race and culture. There was a perception that Australia was such a large country and the population was so small that we would be over run by Asians, who were seen as an inferior race of dubious moral qualities. The “Yellow Peril”.
Although Australia has an indigenous population of dark skinned people collectively known as Aborigines, they were not treated as citizens, until the mid-1960s. The stated aim of the Department of Aboriginal affairs, back in the early 1900s, was that the Aborigines should be assimilated into the general population and their culture forgotten. Any aboriginal children of mixed race were collected by the government; often taken by force from their distraught mothers, and placed in government run institutions, that basically trained them to be servants (these people are now known as the “Stolen Generation”). The so-called “full bloods” were kept in reserves out in the country, where they were treated as little more than children.
As a consequence of these two government policies, I grew up, not really being very familiar with people of other races.
I was six years old before I met somebody who was of non-Anglo descent. Back in the early 60s there was a large influx of migrants from Italy and Greece. To my childish eyes these new kids from the Mediterranean seemed to be a bunch of sooks who didn’t stand up for themselves and who would always run off to get help from their friends or older siblings whenever they got into strife with other kids. As somebody from an Anglo background I’d grown up with the idea that one had to stand up for themselves and fight their own battles. I guess that’s a hangover from my ancient Celtic cultural past where the self contained hero is held in high esteem, above all. The Mediterranean kids understood co-operation and strength in numbers which I suppose betrays their ancient cultural past. Time and time again, the organised Greeks and Romans thrashed the heroic but disorganised Celts. The poor old Greeks and Italians had a hard time in Australia back in the early 1960s. Here was a bunch of cultured people from the devestated post WWII old world, who had migrated to the savage cultural wasteland that Australia was at that time, and I bet a lot of them thought they’d made the biggest mistake of their lives.
All I’ve got to say is, “thank goodness they came here”, as the English cooking that most of us used to eat was woeful. The Italians and Greeks transformed cuisine here in Australia.
I was seven years old when I first met somebody who I thought was a Negro. In actual fact, he was from Malaya (now known as Malaysia) and had fairly dark skin as Malays do. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember how smart he was. On one occasion, we were sitting together drawing and as I looked across at my Malay classmate’s work I noticed that he wasn’t placing his house on the line that represented the horizon, but actually below the horizon. In that instant, I knew he was more advanced than me. I realised that he was drawing what he saw rather than just repeating the arrangement of symbols (the square house with the triangle roof etc) that we had until then thought of as landscape.
At about the same time, we were receiving our first religious instruction at school. I can still remember the weird dreams triggered in my naive brain as I slept, from all the religious iconography I had been exposed to, and meeting that amazing Malay boy. I dreamt that I was the first black Pope being transported on large uncovered palanquin being carried by a multitude of priests through a huge crowd of the faithful that I blessed as we passed them.
I envied my Malay classmate so much that I wanted to be him and in my ignorance of geography and the world in general I thought he was a Negro and therefore I wanted to be a Negro. Sure enough, there were derogatory anti-Negro epithets in Australian culture back then, but they just didn’t make any sense to me because I had never met a black person and I couldn’t figure out why, one would want to say something bad about or to them.
Back when I was a kid, a lot of things didn’t make sense to me. For instance I thought that when people were referring to Jesus Christ as the King of the Jews, I just assumed the word “Jews” was some sort of Victorian era, anachronistic contraction of the word “jewels”, and it wasn’t until I was about 14 years old and in high school studying the Merchant of Venice in an English class, that I found out what a Jew actually was. As we were reading Shylock’s speech, and when we came to the part, ” and what’s his reason? I am a Jew”, I turned to my friend sitting next to me at the desk and asked him, “what are these Jews?” My classmate (John Ryder) who had been a firm friend for the previous two years turned to me and said, “I’m a Jew”. In hushed tones so the teacher couldn’t hear us, John gave me a quick update and brought me up to speed.
When I got little older I travelled around in Asia for a couple of years and then ended up in North America, which was the first time I’d ever had regular contact with Negroes (which from this point on, in respect cultural of sensitivities, I will call describe as, ”African Americans”). Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s I found that in general, North American culture was very segregated. Not segregated in an official way, but culturally segregated. There just didn’t seem to be much of an overlap of cultures, whites liked the one thing, blacks liked another.
One time back in about 1979, when I was in Miami working at a car show, there was an after hours party and everyone was invited. In a large convention room there are lots of white southerners, dressed in their jeans and leather vests with buck knives on their hips and Stetson’s on their heads, and I was being bored to death by their lack of conversational skill (how many times can one talk about sport and car? Sheesh!) and their horrible taste in music (fuck country and western; cry in your beer music!).
The mood of the room changed when a bunch of African-Americans walked in, wearing flamboyant disco clothing, with a huge ghetto blaster on their shoulder, blaring out the latest disco music. I bet they thought that they were going to just turn the whole place onto something really great and everybody was going to have a good time.
That wasn’t to be.
There was just silence and stares.
The temperature dropped to below zero.
The white southerners weren’t having any of that disco crap, and they basically stared the newcomers out. It was the first time I had seen such a clash of cultures.
It was literally black-and-white.
Another time I was in Philadelphia doing another car show with the laser show, and I had befriended an African American security guard, and we used to shoot the breeze during the slow parts of the day. On the last day of the car show the security guard was directing the display cars out of the auditorium, when one of the white guys driving his pimped out ride, ignored his direction and sped past him. As the car went by the security guard banged the roof of the car, to which the car screeched to a halt and a huge white guy got out and punched the security guard in the face, causing his nose to bleed. The white guy got back into his hot rod and sped off. Meanwhile, somebody had called the police, and I was there when they turned up. The security guard ran over to them, holding his bleeding nose trying to explain what had happened and the two cops got out and threw him against the patrol car and handcuffed him. The security guard was crying out, ” but it was me that they hit!” ” I am the victim here!” The cops ignored him and pushed him into their car making sure that his head hit the roof on the way in, and then they drove off with him.
No I’m not kidding it actually did happen.
In Houston (I was working at the Laser Show in a car show in the Astrohall) I got thrown in jail and when I was in the holding cell I met an old (he looked about 70) impeccably dressed African-American guy. He wasn’t dressed in an overly flash way, but I could see he was a man of quality and style. I went up to him to find out why he was in. He told me that he’d gone into a bar and ordered a cocktail. He was half way through his drink when the manager told him to leave. To this, the old gentleman replied, “I’ll leave when I’ve finished this drink I’ve paid for”. Fair enough I thought. Who’d want to stay in such a place any way? The manager called the police, they arrived within minutes and this lovely, refined old man was arrested for trespassing!
I shit you not!
Another day in Houston (unfortunately I was there in that shit-hole for about a week), on my way to work at the laser show, I was walking in the pouring rain to the Astrohall (which is part of the Astrodome complex), from my hotel. I was slogging through the mud (there were no pavements around the Astrodome complex at that time) , when a big, beautiful, gleaming white Lincoln Continental Mk III pulled up next to me and the passengers door was flung open by a smiling African-American man, who invited me to get in the car out of the rain. I protested to him that my boots were covered in mud and the I would dirty up his car. To which he just replied, “don’t worry about that, so where are you going?” it turned out that he was also heading towards the Astrohall. A true good Samaritan.
For a while the laser show, I was working for became involved with “Gooding’s million-dollar midway” (that’s the carnival company that was featured in the movie Carney) and as they used to say in the old days in England, ” they were rum lot!” There were quite a few guys working there, who had obviously been in prison and saw themselves as being hard and some of these guys were very hostile and openly racist. Whilst working at Gooding’s I met a well built Negro guy from Puerto Rico, who used to be a professional body builder, and at one stage was Mr Puerto Rico. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember what a nice laid-back guy he was. Mr Puerto Rico love to smoke dope and listen to reggae, which more or less described what I was into at that stage of my life. My co-worker at the time was a guy called Mike, who had been in the army for a few years and had confided in me, that it was in the army that he had learned to hate Negroes.
Strangely enough, for Mike, he found that in comparison to the other dirt bags that we were working with, Mr Puerto Rico, shone like a diamond in a pool of mud. Mr Puerto Rico was such a nice guy, Mike found it very easy to forget his prejudices and all three of this used to hang out together smoking dope and listening to reggae.
One evening we were coming home to our hotel in Mike’s van and we saw Mr Puerto Rico being beset by a group of about six other carnies. It looked like what I imagine an old Bear baiting scene would have. There are in the middle was this huge guy with a pack of other guys trying to take him down. I told Mike to slow down and pull up to the group as I went into the back of the van and opened up the side door. As we pulled alongside, I called out to Mr Puerto Rico, ” quick jump in!” and of course, he dived into the back of a van and we sped off, as his antagonists threw their beer cans at us.
We drove for a few blocks, then slowed down to find out what had happened. We were told that Mr Puerto Rico had just been walking home when some of his other fellow carnies had seen him and decided that they were going to beat him up. Apparently, it was thought by the trailer trash who were bothering him, that he was a little bit too good-looking for his own good and they thought that some of the white girls in the carnival were interested in having sex with him.
Mr Puerto Rico just wept as he told us this.
I knew some of the guys who had been hassling Mr Puerto Rico, so I went and saw their ringleader the next day. He was a very stocky, well built and very aggro little mother fucker who used to walk around with the thick end of a pool cue, with a large brass ball on the end of it, permanently tied to his wrist. I was under the mistaken impression that this nasty little prick and I got along, and when I tried to explain to him that Mr Puerto Rico was a great guy and that they should all leave him alone; I got the shock of my life when he said to me that he had, “no time for any nigger lovers” and that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to get my face smashed in, as he waved the end of the pool cue in my face.
Gee, I thought that went well!
When I was in Syracuse, New York after two weeks with a US rail pass on Amtrak I had an experience that showed me very clearly that some people who actually do indulge in “random kindness and senseless acts of beauty”. I had basically run out of money but had saved enough change for two phone calls so I could call my workmates who were staying at the Holiday Inn in Syracuse to come and pick me up. Unfortunately at the time there were three Holiday Inns in Syracuse and of course the two Holiday Inns that I called first, weren’t the ones where my co-workers were staying so I was stuck without any money to call the last Holiday Inn. So I went up to you the ticket counter, and as a flamboyantly dressed African American stood to the side counting his change, I asked the teller, if I could use their phone because I had run out of money to call my friends. The white teller just stared at me at in blank non-comprehension, and shook his head in the negetive. Just as I thought I was in a hopeless situation, the guy counting his change next to me, just turned to me with an outstretched hand full of money and said with a kind smile, “here, take what you need”.
Another African-American good Samaritan!
Another time during winter, I was back in Philadelphia again. It had been snowing heavily all day, and as we were returning to our hotel after being out for the evening, an African American guy came up to us and asked us if we had any jumper cables.
My two co-workers automatically said no.
This surprised me because I always thought that they were pretty decent guys, and I remonstrated with them, that we should at least have a look in our truck to see if we had some. As it would happen, we didn’t have any jumper cables and we weren’t able to help him start his car. I asked the African American guy why he just didn’t just catch the subway home or call a friend to come and help him and he explained, that he just didn’t have any money on him. When he said that; my co-workers just rolled their eyes, but since I had been in the same situation myself before (many times) I just put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a handful of change, like the guy in Syracuse who helped me. I said to him, ” here, take what you need”. He just looked at me, dumbfounded with an embarrassed expression on his face and just stood there. I could see he didn’t know what to do, so I just grabbed his hand and put all the money that I had in my hand (which wouldn’t have been more than a few dollars) into his hand.
He burst into tears as he told me that he’d been trying since late afternoon, and well into the night trying to get some help, and nobody would help. He then said that I’d just given him enough money to phone his family who he knew would be worried about him and to catch the subway home. He thanked me and then he went on his way.
My co-workers looked at me in astonishment and said, “what the hell did you do that for; you know he just ripped you off!”
I guess some people just don’t get it; “what goes around, comes around”.
I felt it was the least I could do, considering how decently I had been treated by African Americans who didn’t know me. Who helped me despite the fact that many of them were so badly treated in their own society. In a way, the racist policies of the past Australian governments has served me well, as I’ve grown up without any of the baggage that burden so many people in the US. In my two years of working in America, I was amazed at how few African-Americans I actually got to meet in social circumstances. Sure, you’ll meet African-Americans in the various service industries one deals with, but it’s almost like there two separate countries in the US.
One white and one black.
It’s quite interesting to me when I watch American television and English television to see the differing ways that those two countries portray Negroes. English television seems to be making a concerted effort to show people of African descent as equals. Only last night I was watching the TV show, “Hustle” and the main character who leads a group of white people, is black, and talks with an English accent. American TV shows seem to portray African Americans in stereotypical terms. Just like in the movie “Crash”, where the African American director is forced to portray people of his race, speaking in Ebonics, there seems to be some underlying effort in the States to show the differences between the races, rather than the similarities.
Having said all this about the American mass media, there are obviously many conscious and socially aware people in the US who would like to change the staus quo, producing movies like, Three Kings(one of my favourite movies).
Below is the the amazing interrogation scene from “Three Kings” mixed with a history of Wacko Jacko’s face.
This is a photo of my wife (Engogirl) having the first decent sleep she has had for the last week or so. We went to bed at 9:30 last night and this photo was taken at 9am this morning.
Sometimes, travelling can be so exhausting and daunting. We came up to Queensland for a conference in Surfers Paradise, on big dams here in Australia. We thought we may as well go all the way up to Cairns to do a couple of days diving on the Great Barrier Reef (before global warming kills it off) . We also thought it would be a good thing to travel up the coast by train in a sleeper.
What with all the conference schedules and dam tours (or should I say, “tours to dams”?), early train departures and poor sleeping conditions on train and boat, complete with recent strenuous physical activity, we are totally worn out and ache all over. Today we were supposed to be going on a trip up to Kuranda on an old steam train but we both decided that we’d rather sleep in and have a relaxing day resting before we fly back home tomorrow.
Engogirl has been a real trooper over the last couple of days. Unlike me, all this full on travel and outdoor experience thing is still quite new to her.
I grew up near the ocean and learnt how to scuba dive when I was 14 years old back in the days when all you were really told was, “don’t come up faster than your air bubbles”. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve snorkelled and spear fished, because I’ve done so much of it over the years. I also backpacked around various foreign countries for 11 years roughing it, before going home.
Engogirl grew up, a little back from the coast, and going to the beach was not a part of her upbringing. The ocean is still “terra incognita” to her, and uncomfortable travelling hasn’t been on Engogirl’s agenda either. The first time Engogirl had ever snorkelled was on our honeymoon in Bali, four years ago.
Two days ago, my wife tried scuba diving for the first time out in the open ocean about 30km (about 20 miles) off the coast. Scuba diving isn’t all that difficult but it is a bit disconcerting breathing underwater. “It just ain’t right, I tell ya!” Never mind that the ocean is full of things that can view us a food and there was no land in sight.
I’ve never thought that scuba diving was that interesting and I just went along with Engogirl to keep her company and to reassure her. We did our dive together and Engogirl said to me afterwards that she thought that snorkelling was much better. I so totally agree. So we spent the rest of our time on the reef snorkelling.
I can’t really describe how glorious it is to share amazing experiences with people you care about, but I can tell you that I love it. After two days of diving, it was difficult to get Engogirl out of the water she was loving it so much. There was no more fear or hesitation, just joy and I was glad to be a part of it.
Unfortunately the sun was so hot and Engogirl didn’t put enough sunscreen on the back of her legs and she got a bit sunburnt. To make matters worse she slipped on the deck and barked her shin.
So as I looked at Engogirl sleeping so peacefully this morning I was taken by how strong she had been over the last couple days breaking through various fears, dealing with discomfort and pain. It’s times like this morning when I realise that I married the right woman and I know how lucky I am.
This last weekend, my wife and I went down to Wombeyan Caves, 180kms south of Sydney to meet up with some friends and go camping. Instead of going down the freeway via Gouldburn we went down to Mittagong, and then cut across to the west along 60 km of winding dirt road. We like to take the back roads, but in this case, I think we made a mistake as the road is very narrow, and quite dangerous due to poor visibility around corners. The next two photos will give non-Australian visitors to this blog an idea of how dry most of the countryside is in this area.
All the same it was an interesting trip to pass through an area covered in dry sclerophyll forest that is in rain shadow caused by the Great Dividing Range. To call the Great Dividing Range, “Great”, is a bit of a joke because it only rises to about 2,000m at its greatest height, but it does affect rain reaching further inland from the coast. Although many of areas along the eastern coast of New South Wales have received a lot of rainfall lately, there are still many areas that are quite dry.
On Friday night, we after we had set up camp we sat around the campfire with our friends, Brad and Linda and my wife’s uncle Ray. All of us love camping, and we don’t care what the weather is like so when it started to rain we just got out a plastic sheet and sat under it.
To be honest, I don’t really care much for caves, as I feel once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
But Wombeyan Caves has a very good camp ground, and it was great to get out of town for the weekend and catch up with some friends. One of the things that I really love about camping is sitting around a fire at night. Ray brought along a guitar and kept us entertained with well played hits from his youth.
He did a very passable rendition of Peter Sarstedt’s classic hit, “Where do you go to my lovely” (about the easiest way to find this song is on the soundtrack CD of the movie The Darjeeling Limited)
I sit writing this, a little hung over and very tired.
It has been said in the media by various financial gurus (probably the same bums that got the world into the trouble it is in, in the first place) that the best way to get out at the current worldwide financial crisis is for people to keep on spending. Fortunately for my wife and I, we aren’t wealthy enough to have money to invest and our house is paid off, which of course means that we aren’t overly exposed to the financial chaos that is currently happening around the world.
When ever I travel in the developing World, I often find myself thinking about what some of the poor people in such countries must think when they see images from the developed world. I can understand how some people must look at such images and long for the lifestyle that is shown. Of course many of us in the developed world have the same longings.
Many people when they are asked what they most wish for, will reply that they wished they were rich. I guess a lot of people want more money so they don’t have to work so they can relax and it would seem that a lot of people think that owning more possessions will make them happy. I think, that if I had a lot more money I would certainly travel more and of course I would like to build the dream home. Nothing too ostentatious or grand, just nice. Having said what I would do if I had more money I’d like to say that I don’t actually long for it and I feel that I have quite a nice life.
Actually, I have a bloody good life!
On Sunday, my wife and I had a late lunch with some oenophile friends (Brett and Cathy) who were visiting Sydney from Adelaide (for a mutual friend’s wedding) and who had brought along some extremely fine wine with them. Both Brett and Cathy live near the Barossa Valley, which is Australia’s premier Shiraz, producing area and they know some of the most famous winemakers here in Australia. I have another wine loving friend, Peter, who I thought would enjoy meeting Brett and Cathy so I invited him over for lunch as well. When Peter found out what wine that Brett and Cathy were bringing and what food I was serving, he also brought over some of his best wines from his collection.
I enjoy drinking wine, but I find it very hard spending more $15 or $20 on a bottle of wine, because I just don’t think it’s worth it as I feel that I wouldn’t notice what the difference was. I don’t think it would be a very successful strategy to start developing aristocratic taste for exquisite wines I can’t really afford.
Thanks to Brett, Cathy and Peter, my wife and I got to try some wines that were so rare and expensive that I’d never thought in my wildest dreams, that I would ever even get to taste them. It’s just one of those things that I always thought that would be out of my reach much like the first world lifestyle offered to people of Third World. Legendary stuff that you only hear about, but you never actually get to experience.
Last night I got a glimpse what it’s like to drink the kind of wine that usually only millionaires can afford. Don’t get me wrong, Brett and Cathy are not rich. They have been buying wine for the last 20 years, when it is cheap and putting it in their cellar until it is ready to be drunk. Brett told me he bought the 1994 Hill of Grace that we drank, back when it was released for only $30. Unfortunately, the American wine critic Robert Parker found out about the wine and told the world how good it was and the price went through the roof. If you wanted to buy a bottle of 1994 Hill of Grace today and you walked into a bottle shop you could expect to pay $500 for that wine.
So what can I say? I sure as hell wouldn’t pay that kind of money for wine, but tell you what, I’ll help you drink it!
Yesterday’s lunch exposed me to a range of experiences that I hadn’t encountered before. Firstly, I was a little bit freaked out about what food I was going to serve to complement and do justice to such wine. Luckily, my friend Peter gave me some solid advice, and told me that the truffle risotto that I had planned as an entree would be excellent, and he said that he’d bring some French pinot noir to go with it. Peter then said that I should keep the flavours of the main meal simple so that wines that Brett and Cathy were bringing could be more fully appreciated, and not overwhelmed by strong flavours; so he suggested that I just cook a high-quality piece of meat and serve it with roast vegetables.
One of my faults is that I always confuse complexity with quality and it’s a good thing that Peter was around to make sure I didn’t make something unsuitable like a curry if I had of been left to my own devices.
Another thing that I found very interesting about being around people, who know so much about wine is that they just want to share what they have with other people. Brett, Cathy and Peter have been so open-handedly generous to me with their wines. I guess there is hardly any point in having nice wine unless you can share it with friends. Brett and Cathy also made a very interesting point, when they told me that all the winemakers that they know are very down to earth and natural people. Brett basically said, “look, they’re farmers and they’re not interested in poseurs”.
And I know what Brett meant when he said that, because I was at a dinner once, when one of the other guests, told me about his collection of Grange Hermitage (Australia’s most famous, and arguably best wine). So I said to him to him, “do you drink it much?” To which he replied, of course not, it’s an investment!
Call me kinky, call me weird, but I just don’t get that.
He was the sort of guy that just wanted people to know that he owned a collection of Grange Hermitage, and for him it was obviously a status symbol. As a matter of fact, I heard him say later on in the evening, ” oh, we were out on our 60 foot yacht the other day and the girls got really cranky with me because we ran out of champagne before lunch!” he kept referring to his yacht as a 60 foot yacht. I was asked later on in the evening, if I wanted to come sailing on the 60 foot yacht?
……….um……..
What does one say to such a question from such a person? So my answer to him was, “sure”; knowing full well that I’d only go on board with him at gunpoint.
So, on Sunday, surrounded by good friends, I saw another, more natural and relaxed side of the wine scene.
So what about the wine itself, how was it?
In a word, great!
And so it should be! The 12 wines, that the six of us (the sixth person was my wife’s uncle) polished off were worth well over $1000.
One of the rather strange and interesting things was, that we drank a French wine (1976 Chateau Cissac haut medoc) that was bottled in the same year that my wife was born. It would be a safe bet to say, that not many of us have drunk wine as adults, that is as old as ourselves.
I’ll tell you what though, knowing all about wine can sometimes undermine your enjoyment of it. As soon as Brett and Cathy tasted the Hill of Grace they both concluded that we had opened it too soon, and they should have probably left it for about another five years. Needless to say, I didn’t feel that way about it, because I am so ignorant about such things. As a matter of fact, I thought it was delicious, as was every other wine that was on the table. So much better than the “cleaning products” (to quote Tom Waites) that I normally imbibe.
Brett and Cathy also pointed out how some much cheaper wines, like the Wendouree can equal or surpass the much more famous and expensive wines, such as Hill of Grace. I guess that’s where there the rub is. To get the most enjoyment and value out of wine, you have to know something about it.
I think I’m well on the way to becoming a wine wanker!
The only negative to the whole day was that I had to get up at 4am and drive Bret and Cathy to the airport. Now that was like a bad dream!
Below is a video of Cathy going for a skydive recently for her birthday
I have a friend called Brett, who lives in Adelaide, South Australia, near some of the very best wine producing areas in this country.
Several months ago, Brett contacted me because he was in a bit of a bind with a purchase of a second hand guitar that he had made over the Internet. The guitar was an Epiphone Explorer bass that didn’t come with a case and it was sold on the condition that it was to be picked up by the purchaser. Trouble was, Brett lives in Adelaide and the guitar was in Sydney so he rang me up to ask me to go and have a look at it, to inspect its condition; pick it up, and then wrap it up for shipment by air to him.
The guitar was in the excellent condition that it was advertised and so I picked it up. Being a bass guitar meant that it had an extra long neck and to be honest, it was huge. Another thing that caused me concern was that the headstock bent back further back than the very back of the body of the guitar so that when it was laid down, the headstock was supporting the weight of the guitar. I just didn’t think that wrapping it in bubble wrap and cardboard was going to get it to Adelaide in one piece, so I rang Brett and told him about my fears for his new guitar. Unfortunately, because the guitar was so big, the carry cases for them quite rare, and therefore they cost quite a bit more than normal cases, so I offered to make him a wooden carry case for it.
Brett’s father owns an upholstery business, and as such, Brett has access to the materials to cover the case with, and the hardware to hold it together.
In the meantime, my friend Mark was going back to his home town of Adelaide (Mark and Brett grew up together) for a short trip, so he offered to take the guitar in its case to Brett.
Brett was very happy with the job that I did for him and he rang me up to thank me and to see if there was anything he could do for me.
I know that Brett has a large wine collection of very high quality Australian wines, so I said to him, half jokingly, just bring around a bottle of ”Hill of Grace” (one of very the best wines made in Australia, at any price, which I know he has quite a bit of) next time he is in Sydney, knowing full well that probably wouldn’t happen for quite a while and that would let him off the hook feeling obliged.
Brett surprised me by replying that he would be coming to Sydney at the end of October for Mark’s upcoming wedding and that he would be bringing a few bottles of wine with him.
As a rule, I don’t really have that much time for the whole wine wanker scene. I consider myself a bit of a wine philistine in that I don’t believe that one should spend a lot of money on things that one probably wouldn’t appreciate anyway, just for a pose. Having said that, I have three friends who have extensive knowledge about wine and large collections who have patiently dragged me, kicking and screaming like the low class trailer trash that I am, into a better understanding of oenophilia.
Over the last couple of years, my friend Peter (who collects wines), has been generous enough to share his knowledge and wine with me. So it was with great pleasure I was able to invite him to a barbecue at my place on this coming Sunday with Brett and his wife to enjoy the wine that was coming.
Last night, Brett sent me an e-mail with a photograph of the wines that he is bringing, so I looked them up on the Internet to find out a bit more about them, to try and gauge what I should cook to go with such wines.
I got the shock of my life when I found out more about the wines that Brett is going to be bringing along.
The wine is worth at least twice as much as the guitar and one of the bottles, the 1992 Wendoree Shiraz Malbec is quite rare, and is considered by many to be a spectacular wine.
The 1994 Henschke Hill of Grace Shiraz is of such quality and fame that puts it in a price range that I thought I would never ever get to taste.
The 1993 Turkey Flat Shiraz is made from some of the oldest shiraz vines in the world. Apparently, the original Shiraz vines in France were wiped out by phyloxia (a nematode) , and that modern French shiraz vines have been grafted to the root stock of a native American variety of grape from the Mississippi region. Which is ironic because the nematodes were first brought to Europe from America. It seems that the French had to import their current shiraz vines from here in Australia, South Africa and South America.
As I write this, it makes me think about the famous Australian bush walker, Paddy Pallin, who once said, something along the lines of, “if you know the names of a few trees, when you look at the bush, it’s not just bush any more”. I’m starting to feel that way about wine, in that the more I know about it, the more interested I become in it and therefore, the more I enjoy and think about it when I drink it.
So to make sure that I do justice to Brett’s generosity in sharing his fabulous wines (that I don’t deserve), I will be going out and buying the absolute best piece of meat to barbecue for us this Sunday. Probably the best meat to barbecue (I have a kettle style Webber barbecue that burns charcoal) that you can buy here in Sydney would be a whole Scotch fillet of organically grown, aged Angus beef.
Spring has well and truly sprung. It’s almost like someone just flipped a switch. One day it’s cold, overcast and windy and suddenly the next day is clear and hot. The weather has been so glorious that my wife and I spent last weekend pottering around in the garden planting new plants (mainly Australian natives as they’re much more hardy and require far less water) and re-oiling our outdoor furniture.
Although our back yard is very small, we have over the years made it into a very nice place sit and relax. My idea of heaven is to sit outside in the morning with my wife and read the weekend paper together then do a bit of gardening during the day to be followed by a barbeque at night. As a matter of fact that’s just what we did. On Saturday night we had the neighbours over to help us eat some barbequed and smoked loin of pork and knock over several bottles of wine whilst chilling out to Gabin
(one of my favourite movies).
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