Monday, April 23^rd .....

It’s been a pretty miserable, rainy few days and we’ve not felt inclined to do very much.  Marilyn has had a chest infection and all she wants to do is mope around the house drinking cups of tea and watching TV.  We’ve started the series of The West Wing which we missed the first time around.  We bought the complete 7 series and are now digging away at them.  It’s quite lightweight compared to what we normally prefer: Silent Witness, Wire in the Blood, etc – but it draws you in like all good drama.

Today is shaping up to be much brisker.  The clouds are breaking up and the sun is struggling to break through.  A friend of Jamie’s stayed over last night so we’re a bit slow in getting organised, what with conversations and shared cups of coffee, and so on.  Our family joke is that we would prefer to become helmets and live on our own.  If you ever watched Gilligan’s Island, you might recall Gilligan’s confusion between helmet and hermit.  It’s sad, isn’t it, that I look at pop culture for literary inspiration.

I’ve also spent a lot of time on the computer in the past week.  Having broadband encourages extra usage but I’m amazed at how much information I’ve winkled out about Japan now that I’m not limited in how far I can dig.  When we arrive at Osaka airport, we will catch a train to Osaka and then walk through the underground shopping mall to our hotel.  Using Google throws up moments of magic.  I had an idea where the hotel was but any maps I could find were all in Japanese.  But I discovered that, if I right-click on a location, I get the option ‘What’s Here?’  This gives me a list of businesses at this location (all in Japanese).  Patiently, I click on each of them in turn then ask Google to translate.  Voila!  There is the Sun Members Umeda just where I thought it might be.

サンメンバーズ大阪梅田‎ - Sun Members Osaka Umeda

Not only that, I’m given the option of an interactive street view so I can see what the front of the building looks like.  Anyway, after an hour or so, I’ve mapped the whole walk from the station, through the underground mall to the right exit to the surface (Kitashinchi Station, East exit, #F-92), the pedestrian crossing we need and the street we walk along to the hotel.  What can go wrong?  If I were really anal, I could print out images of each step of the way and carry them with me to make sure we didn’t make a wrong turn.  But, I’m really not that bad.

I’ve also discovered that the Osaka Aquarium claims to be the largest in the world, it is 8 storeys high and you start at the top (like Questacon), and walk down through the different levels to the bottom and that one of the attractions is a whale shark!  Wow!  Clearly, we’re going to run out of time before we do everything we want.  And we could spend the week without seeing a single temple.   

Saturday, April 14th .....

My internet search continues for interesting places within an hour or two of Osaka. Today, I looked to the south, around Wakayama. There’s a regular rail service to the area by a train called Kuroshio and the line follows the coast. Tourist information says to ask for a seat on the right-hand side of the carriage but for the best views try to sit behind the driver and enjoy the panoramic vista through his windscreen. Japanese train drivers are very egalitarian and their compartment is surrounded by glass and in full view of the passengers – not like Australian train drivers who hide away in case we see them picking their noses or scratching their bottoms.

One of the cities in that area looked good. The beach at Shirahama is rated the 88th most beautiful beach in Japan, famous for its white sand. (The Japanese love to number and rank things). I discovered that the sand is imported from Australia. What a rip-off!

On one of the tourist sites, I found this photo of visitors to Shirahama, accompanied by a quote:
“Let there be warmth in human society, let there be light in all human beings.("Declaration of the Levelers Association")”
I couldn’t resist: what is the Levelers Association? Apparently it was established in Japan in 1922 as a group to look after the rights of Buraku who are members of a diverse social group, descendants of outcast communities of the Japanese feudal era. So there!

Not much is happening here in Dilston. We have a new inhabitant of our block – a juvenile echidna seems to have taken up residence in one of the piles of dirt we laughingly call ‘rockeries’. We’ve seen him a couple of times in the same area, turning over stones and digging into the ground looking for ants.

We had a quick trip to Deloraine today to deliver some stuff to our storage shed. I took our luggage scale with me to check the weights of our two old suitcases. My Polo case, which I bought in KL in 2007 weighed 5.5Kg but Marilyn’s quite expensive Monsac, which is only about three years old, weighed a massive 5.7Kg. That means we’ve been carrying 11.2Kg of material, hinges and handles. With our new, flash Samsonites, we’ll cut that down to 6.2Kg – that’s 5Kg of extra stuff we can squeeze in. Fantastic!

Wednesday, April 11th .....

I’ve just finished reading a book by Robert Crais and I’m left with a feeling of disquiet, a sort of bad taste in my mouth. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why but I’ve now realised that it’s a culmination of an issue that has been building up in the back of my brain for some time.

I think it started months ago when I was reading a book where the hero had been a sniper in Vietnam. That’s OK, I know people do these things but maybe it’s like kinky sex – not to be talked about in public. I find it hard to accept that a soldier could be a hero if he sat up in a tree picking off people who randomly wandered by. But at that stage I simple shrugged my shoulders and moved on to the next book.

Later, I happened to be reading The Eleventh Commandment by Jeffrey Archer. The hero of this book is lauded as a hero, a good family man who deserved the congratulations of a grateful nation. The problem is, he was an assassin for the CIA, following the orders of politicians to bump off the Defence Minister of some South American country, or whoever happens to be in the way of the USA’s foreign policy. What’s heroic about that? He’s no more than a cold-blooded murderer.

The Robert Crais book brought all my misgivings to the surface. The hero, Elvis Cole, is a private detective but goes further than that. He thinks it’s OK to shoot people who get in his way. He and his off-sider, Joe, shoot first and asks questions later. I know, I know, it’s only fiction but what effect is it having on a culture which no longer has a moral compass. Once upon a time, we grew up with a set of values which we absorbed from people we respected – parents, political leaders, church leaders, police, school teachers and so on.

Sadly, our respect for these pillars of society has been eroded and we now look to pop-stars and celebrities for moral guidance. God help us!

Talking about God, I can’t help but comment on the confrontation on Q&A this week between Richard Dawkins, the well-known atheist and Archbishop Pell. The Archbishop was well out of his depth and his muddled and incoherent philosophy would convince no-one. Dawkins is a smug and unlikeable individual but more than held his own against a very poor opponent. Tony Jones stepped outside his role of moderator to assist in putting in the boot to the Archbishop but I imagine it would have been hard to resist. What a mismatch!

Tuesday, April 10 .....

It’s just six weeks until we fly out so the excitement is starting to mount. I’ve been tweaking the itinerary as our mood changes and we’ve decided to delete some of the ideas we were considering which would entail long trips in the train. For example, to visit Takayama would entail a 7-hour round trip by train for 4 hours in the town. Doesn’t meet the cost-benefit test.

To compensate, I’ve looked again at places closer to where we are staying and have discovered a little fishing village, Tomo-no-Ura, which is an hour by train and 30 minutes by bus from Osaka. It’s on the Inland Sea and in the Edo period was a stopping –off place for Korean diplomats. Apparently, it’s quite beautiful and we’ll be able to visit a factory where they make prawn crackers and a distillery where a famous herbal wine is made.

One of the last things we had to do was organise visas and China is the only country which demands this. We will arrive in Tianjin on June 12th, travel to Beijing for a one-night stopover before flying to Singapore. We had to apply for a five-day visa – cost $60 each, plus $110 service fee. $230 total!

We decided to shout ourselves some new suitcases. With all the airlines becoming more stringent with weight limits, we decided we would have some new lightweight cases. We carry mid-size (70-litre) cases which are easier to handle than the bigger ones and the Samsonite ones we bought weigh just 3.2Kg each. I bought my old suitcase in Kuala Lumpur one time and I reckon it might weigh about 6Kg so I’m happy that I’ll be able to carry a few more essentials. Marilyn has a very nice carry-on bag which she bought a few years ago but it’s only small and weighs 3.2 Kg as well. When you consider you’re limited to 7Kg in a carry-on, the weight of the bag is a significant factor.

I’m having a night off from Rotary. I slept badly last night and have been seedy all day so I thought I should keep my germs to myself. Still, being home gave us a chance to watch ‘Where Did You Come From?’ with Melissa George as the guest. It’s a very emotional program and people are confronted by the tragedies that their forebears lived through. Melissa discovered that her great-grandparents, on her mother's side, came from England after the First World War as child migrants sent to Fairbridge Farm School in Western Australia. Their stories were tear-jerkers – as one of them said, they were ‘dumped’ by their parents and sent to a strange land where they were expected to work like slaves – the boys being trained as farm labourers and the girls for domestic service. The myth was that the migrant children were orphans rescued from institutions or from the street. The reality is that many of them were handed over by their parents for one reason or another – poverty was probably the most common reason but, in many cases ,the children were told that their parents had died and Australia was their new home.

My aunt worked for a time at the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong in NSW so I always pay attention when I hear the name. It was quite a big place as the aerial photo shows with a number of cottages, mini-hospital, dining room, hall, etc. They killed all their own meat and grew most of their vegetables. My brother and I spent at least one summer holiday at the farm and we thought their life was idyllic. Of course, we saw only a few weeks of life there, when the weather was good and the pressure of school was off. The stories we hear now of the hardship and the poor education and the brutality of some of the staff make you wonder. Of course, Kingsley Fairbridge and others like him had the best of intentions but they were products of their class and did not consider that their patronising attitude to the children could have been counter-productive. Even though I was young, I can remember children who told me that they were only at Fairbridge for a short time and that their parents would be coming soon to collect them; I don’t know why I knew they were kidding themselves.

Still, I have very good memories of a wonderful summer yabbying, riding horses, hitchhiking into Molong to swim in the pool and having dozens of other kids to play with. I was about 12 and I remember hitch-hiking alone into Orange (about 30Km) to meet my mother. Couldn’t do it now!

Saturday, April 7th .....

I love it when society opens its arms and accepts people who, a decade ago, would have been shunned and sneered at. I'm talking, of course, of the oddball who collects esoteric objects, or the weirdo with a passion for something unusual, and the eccentric who seems out of step with the rest of the world. England, of course, is the home of the eccentric. Where else in the world would priests of the Anglican Church gather for a fashion parade of church vestments? It’s the home, too, of twitchers and train spotters.


Train spotters are an interesting breed – called anoraks to ensure they understand that the way they dress gives them away. The word conjures images of a sad little man standing on a railway bridge waiting for the 11.16 to pass by so they can note down the number hoping for a glimpse of the 500 Railstar with off-centre bogey wheels (or something like that).

I happened to be on the website of the Powerhouse Museum yesterday and was delighted to see that this august institution has a photographic competition for trainspotters. After all, they have relics there of the NSW General Railways and, no doubt, a faithful following of railway enthusiasts who come regularly to drool over the early locomotives.

The competition has sections for steam locomotives, another for diesel-electric (not a very romantic section, I would have thought), railway infrastructure like bridges, turntables, stations, etc, and, joy o joy, people on the railway. The decision to have that last section is pure genius: a way to build a bridge between the fascination with inanimate railway stock and humanity.

I downloaded a couple of photographs which were last year’s winners and can’t wait for the 2012 results to come out.

Thursday, April 5th .....

The Battlefield Band concert was held in the Community Complex just across from where we are camped. I kept an eye out during the afternoon for a big truck with the PA but all I saw was a dirty Landrover and a tatty beige van. There’s always people coming and going so I paid them no attention, until mid-afternoon when I heard the sound of the bagpipes. There was a young fellow in bare feet wandering up and down behind the complex running through his pieces. Clearly they didn’t have a big PA and had slipped in unnoticed.

There was certainly a crowd and I was interested to see that there was to be a basketball game in the adjoining court. I wondered which activity would impact on the other. In fact, we could have been in separate towns. The basketball was just as loud as ever and the band certainly lifted the tin on the roof but nobody noticed that the other group was there.

We arrived in plenty of time (not far to go!) but we struggled to find a good seat but it all turned out well in the end. What a band! They are the headliners at the Canberra Folk Festival and certainly deserve that honour. The players are only young but extraordinarily talented and professional. Their music is complex, rousing and engaging; I thought I knew a bit about Scottish folk music but didn’t recognise a single piece. Apart from the guitarist who stuck to what he knew best, the other band-members played at least two instruments each.

The band was started in 1969 in the Glasgow area of Battlefield, named for the Battle of Langside (1568) when James VI defeated Mary, Queen of Scots. The last of the original members retired in 2010. The current line-up has no Glaswegians: Sean O’Donnell was born in Ireland, Alasdair White was born in the village of Tong on the Island of Lewis, Ewan Henderson is from Fort William in the West Highlands and Mike Katz was born in Los Angeles but moved to Scotland when he was 18. A couple of them are Gaelic speakers and there were a few songs in that language. Ewan encouraged the audience to sing along – cheeky! The photograph I posted yesterday isn’t the current line-up so I’ve found another one. In comparison with the others, Alasdair White is, as my mother would have said, ‘awfie wee’, but his fiddle-playing was exquisite.

The audience were great. The usual odd-balls wore Scottish hats and, in one case, a kilt and many got up to dance the reels and strathspeys so it was a great night. I’m delighted we were able to get tickets in the end.

Wednesday, April 4th .....

It was quite a lively meeting at Rotary last night. I was Chairman and I received a call in the morning to say that, because of a mix-up, we had two guest speakers and also one of the Rotarians had asked for her daughter to be allowed five minutes to report on something she had been involved with in London.

Now, experience shows that ‘five minutes’ really means ten and there is always someone who wants to ask a question (just showing-off!); a typical guest speaker needs 30 minutes minimum plus some extra time for questions so we’re looking at 85 minutes without any allowance for mishap. As our meeting is only 90 minutes long and we have to line up at the buffet, eat our dinner, have reports, Heads and Tails and Fines, it’s clear we’re in trouble.

As it happens, it worked out fine. One of the Guest Speakers only wanted to give a short update on some work she is doing in the Philippines, and to present our President with a Thank-you for the support we have given her. The daughter who wanted five minutes didn’t turn up so there was plenty of time to get through our business.

One interesting thing happened during the fine session. A member rose and wanted to fine his wife (who wasn’t there) because she was hassling him about his new hobby. She had said, Who on earth introduced you to this? Has anyone here heard of Geocaching? asked Mike. A few of us put up hands, including Marilyn and me. That’s who’s responsible, he said, pointing to us. I read about it on John’s blog and now I can’t get enough of it. It gives you a warm feeling to think you are responsible for family discord.

We had a bit of luck yesterday. At the Book launch on Friday, we had got talking to a couple who run a spectacular B&B in Deloraine, and were bemoaning the fact that we had missed out on tickets for the Battlefield Band (loud Scottish folk) which is playing its only Tasmanian gig in Deloraine tonight. Deloraine? Why did they pick Deloraine for their only gig? Who knows, but the tickets sold out on the first day of release, months ago. I had an email yesterday from Helen from the B&B, saying she had 2 tickets available and they were only $10 each. Ha! I couldn’t wait to grab then. And then, today, a woman drove up to the van to say she had another 2. What luck! Jamie can come as well and we still have one to pass on to someone else.

I’ll report on the concert tomorrow if I haven’t lost my hearing in the meantime.

Monday, April 2nd .....

On both occasions that we’ve been parked here at Deloraine, there’s been a group in the Rotary Pavilion. It’s been the same group both times: maybe 8 or 10 people altogether, arriving about 9.30 each morning and leaving about 6.30. We’ve been told it’s a training session for some therapy, like Reflexology or something. It’s apparently pretty intensive because each booking has been for six days. My heart sinks when I think of how boring twelve days of training would be.

I know a couple of people in the group and, if it is an alternative therapy, they’re just the people I would expect to be involved. The leader of the group came out to talk to me one day. Someone had told him that I was involved with a school for autism and he wanted to tell me that he had the answer. He gave me a complicated lecture on trace metals in the system and said that people with autism couldn’t absorb zinc and often had an excess of molybdenum which is a zinc-inhibitor. He says that if you hold a bottle of zinc near a particular area of the back and it goes weak that shows a zinc deficiency.

I had lots of questions: what goes weak? How does the zinc communicate with the back if they don’t touch? What colour are the aliens who devised this theory? And so on .... However, I kept my mouth shut and just smiled politely. The fellow claimed he was an expert on trauma and could use his techniques to help. He also said he travels the world teaching his techniques – USA next week, then Russia and Britain. But this week, Deloraine!

Marilyn and I were enjoying the sun yesterday when he popped his head around the caravan. You would be welcome, he said, to come and throw frisbees with us at lunchtime. How kind, we said, but declined.

All part of life’s rich tapestry, I suppose.

Recently, I mentioned my strong belief in synchronicity. One day last week, Marilyn was home alone and at a loose end so decided she would pop down to the Windermere Cafe to see the staff who work there and maybe have a glass of bubbles with them. While she was there, a woman we had met at one of the TGIF nights appeared, caught sight of Marilyn and promptly offered her a job. The woman is running a series of Early Childhood seminars and thought that Marilyn would be just the person to handle the registrations. A case of being in the right place at the right time ... or a case of synchronicity!