Tuesday, 25th January …..

Tomorrow is Australia Day and already the flags are staring to appear in people’s gardens and on their cars. We had our celebration a couple of days early with a barbecue yesterday for a couple of old colleagues from Giant Steps, and their wives. Since I left, Tim has been appointed Assistant Principal, and Rod is moving on to a new position after three years as teacher in Red room.

We wanted to do something a bit different so organised the menu as a series of small entrée dishes before the main course quite late – something like a tapas menu.

We started with some simple green prawns on skewers, cooked on the hot barbecue plate and served with a choice of lemon mayonnaise or thousand island dressing. There were only enough prawns to give each person three or four but it was easy to see who had more than their share when we counted up the discarded skewers on each plate.

Second entrée saw skewers again, this time with a mushroom and a couple of pieces of capsicum cooked on the barbecue. I rubbed the mushrooms with oil and salt and added some honey mustard just before serving. Fantastic!

Third course was chipolata sausages, beef and chicken, served with sweet chilli sauce, and the final mini-dish was marinated steak, sliced and served on turnip mash with fresh dill.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it and we had to delay the main course to give our appetites a chance to recover. However, there was no-one who refused the scotch fillet steak, lemon-marinated chicken, sautéed red onion, and fresh peaches rubbed with oil and brown sugar and grilled on the barbecue. We had new potatoes with sour cream and a Caesar salad as well.

Dessert was a platter of fresh fruit and cheese.

We are lucky in Australia to have such an abundance of good, fresh food and the culture of taking the best of other national cuisine to produce an imaginative and healthy diet of our own.

We’re still house-sitting but Siaren comes back from the Philippines on Monday and we’ll be able to resume our caravan travels. At this stage we plan to head south to Hobart and beyond. Years ago, we camped at Recherche Bay in the South-West National Park. In the 1800’s more people lives south of Hobart than north, but over the years the area has become virtually deserted. The only large-ish town there now is Southport but you can still find remains of houses, hotels and railway lines in the bush. Our books tell us that it’s safe to take the caravan into the national park over a dirt road and a bridge restricted to 5 tonnes but we’ll probably leave the caravan at Southport and take the car on from there so we can check it out.

I remember one bridge from the last time we went (which must have been about 1977); it consisted of two ancient tree trunks, with railway sleepers lying across them. We were with a few other vehicles so everybody piled out while the drivers tentatively inched across not knowing whether the whole contraption would crash into the creek below. Maybe a new bridge has been built since then but we’ll need to check it out before I take the four tonnes of car and ‘van across it.

One other memory of that trip is how sick we were after eating what they called periwinkles collected from the rocks. Some of our party had canoes and brought the shellfish back from rocks out in the bay. They were cooked on an old piece of iron over an open fire and we vomited all night!