Monday, August 29th …..

I’m off to the doctor this afternoon to have my hip checked. It’s really no better than it was when I first complained three weeks ago so it’s time to have it looked at. It’s held me back a bit and I haven’t been able to do some of the things I had on my list. This morning I moved some stuff from the back verandah into the shed and then I had to sit down to recover. Not much fun!

Because of this, we’ve seen quite a bit of TV. We watched a three-part series called Above Suspicion, based on some Lynda La Plante novels and it was fantastic. We always like Silent Witness and this was in the same league. Now we’re watching the second series of Ashes to Ashes and becoming very involved in that. It’s a bit over the top but that’s OK.

The rugby match on Saturday night was magic. I like Rugby, especially when Australia plays the All Blacks, but to see such a good Australian win is out of this world.

Yesterday we were invited to a barbecue to welcome our friend Siaren’s husband to Australia. Siaren is the Filipina Occupational Therapist we brought to Tasmania in 2005. She was married in the Philippines in September last year (we were at their wedding) and it has taken her this long to get his visa to join her in Tasmania. We decided I would put together a platter of good Australian fruit as our contribution to the meal. It looked terrific but the grapes came from the US, the dates from Mexico, the apricots from Turkey, and the kiwi fruit from New Zealand. Oh well, at least the macadamia nuts were Australian.

Siaren had invited some of their Filipino friends who all arrived with their Australian husbands, which I thought was good, until the men all left to go to the football! So I sat there, the only man in the house apart from the guest-of-honour. Only in Australia! Our other Filipina Occupational Therapist, Shiela, was there and she is very pregnant. Of the 5 specialists we brought out to Australia, three are living in Tasmania, one is in Singapore, and only one has returned to Manila. And that’s how it is in the modern Philippines. Their best and brightest are living elsewhere. A bit like Tasmania, in fact!

Wednesday, August 24th (Part 2) …..

Well the die is cast, the decision has been made, we are on our way. We’ve booked today for an 11-night cruise, leaving Sydney on October 9th and travelling to Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It’s on the Pacific Pearl, the latest ship to join P&O Australia. We’ve not sailed P&O before but our friend, Robyn, sailed on the Pacific Jewel this year and highly recommended it.

We never managed to sail on the old Sitmar Line which plied the Pacific many years ago. The Fairstar, the Fairsea and the Fairsky were notorious for the wild shenanigans of their passengers. This ship was built for Sitmar and was to be named the Fairmajesty. However, Sitmar was bought out by Princess Cruises and she was delivered as the Star Princess. Later she became the Arcadia and then was transferred to a Princess subsidiary, Ocean Village. When Ocean Village was wound up last year, the ship was totally rebuilt and brought to Australia as Pacific Pearl. It is rated 4-star, which sounds OK.

The only outside cabin we were able to get was smaller than others and obscured by lifeboats so we’re inside on Deck 5, at the sharp end. When you get this close to the cruise leaving, you have to take what you can get.

Wednesday, August 24th …..

I’ve stopped buying the local paper. It caters for the lowest common denominator with big pictures and simply explained stories. I’ve read somewhere that most newspapers can be understood by 12-year olds; The Examiner must be written for children of 8. One particular gripe I have is that there are always more pages devoted to football than to real news. How can football reporters find enough stuff to write about, day after day, about the same handful of teams in the AFL league? Certainly, the big pictures help to fill the space but the words don’t add much to the sum of human knowledge.

The other thing which offends me is the parochial and self-congratulatory nature of the stories. Obviously local people like to read about themselves but a newspaper devoted to positive stories about Tasmanians is not much fun.

However, I always glance through the paper when Marilyn and I stop for coffee or lunch. Yesterday, I noted a tiny story at the bottom of a page which admitted that Tasmanians are Australia’s biggest litterers. What? Can this be true? Are the residents of God’s Own Country prone to throw their rubbish around?

There wasn’t much detail in the story but I gather the researchers marked out an area on the ground, perhaps 100 m2 or 1000m2. Then they carefully gathered and counted all the waste: plastic, paper, cigarette butts, etc. Tasmanians scored the highest in each of these areas, particularly in the case of cigarette butts – 53 butts in Tasmania compared to around 40 in the next most grubby state. The researchers also commented that Tasmania’s score might be artificially low as there had been a lot of rain before the count and many butts might have been washed away.

When we had finished lunch yesterday, Marilyn left me to carry out some Secret Women’s Business so I thought I would carry out my own survey. From where I was standing, without moving my feet, I counted 13 discarded cigarette butts, plus this nice little cluster in the flower bed I was standing beside. It makes you proud, doesn’t it!

The afternoon presenter on ABC TV picked up the story and encouraged people to ring in. Most callers were people who wanted to say that, of course, they weren’t litterers but they had seen lots of people discarding their rubbish. Several things were agreed; most throwaway rubbish comes from Macdonalds, many people don’t see cigarette butts as litter, blame the schools who don’t teach anti-littering, litterers are bogans, and if we had penalties like Singapore, we wouldn’t have a problem. Simple, isn’t it?

When Marilyn and I were in Nepal, we were shocked at the amount of litter but, in reality, we would be the same here if the councils didn’t provide people to pick up after us.

Tuesday, August 23rd …..

It seems that Spring has sprung in Tasmania. The wattle is in full bloom and we noticed that a couple of daffodils had raised their heads while we were out yesterday. It’s certainly warmer and we don’t need any heating on in the house during the day.

Last week, when it was so cold, we looked deeply into available cruises to see whether we could arrange a few days in the sun. We had always had in mind that, in retirement, we would grab any last-minute cruises which came up, expecting that they would be cheaper. And, there they were: a 7-night cruise out of Brisbane, and an 8-day cruise out of Sydney, both to Pacific Islands. Of course, they were last-minute: the first leaving on August 27th and the second on August 29th, but the prices were great: less than $800 each! A quick ‘phone call to Best Cruises, full of anticipation, just to find they were both now fully-booked. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

September is out so we are now looking at October. We are very interested in a 16-day cruise following the tracks of the Bounty mutineers, calling in to several ports in Tonga, Fiji and Norfolk Island but the dates are not suitable. The best option is a cruise to Vanuatu and New Caledonia, leaving on October 9th and arriving back in Sydney on October 20th, just in time for us to get to Canberra for our Nepal Reunion on the 22nd. It all looks good but we’ll let it mull around in our heads for a couple of days before we make a decision.

There’s a surgeon here in Launceston who could have a world cruise on what he will make from the Christie family this year. Marilyn has been putting off having her shoulder done but it’s becoming more urgent; I’ve been putting off an operation on my knee but, with the pain I’ve been having with my hip, I suspect that will have to be done sooner rather than later, and Jamie is going in to hospital at the end of the month for an operation on his right elbow. I’m not sure what the problem is but it looks like a bursitis and might be a repetitive strain injury. Anyway, he’ll have at least two months recuperation. It’s just as well we have medical insurance.


I’ve started reading a book by a Scottish author, Grace Munroe. She dedicates it to what I assume are her grand-children, whose names are Gordon, Caitlin, Patrick, Brogan and ….. Keanu! With all the glorious Scottish names to choose from: Hamish, Duncan, Angus, etc, the poor child gets Keanu. I can’t imagine a Prime Minister called Keanu Munroe.

Having said all that, I now discover that Grace Munroe is not a person at all. In fact, it’s the name of a writing team whose real names are Maria Thomson and Linda Watson-Brown. Maria has four children, I imagine called Gordon, Caitlin, Brogan and Patrick. There’s no mention of whether Linda has any children at all. God knows who Keanu is. It might be Linda’s cat!

Saturday, 20th August …..

I thought I’d be over my sore hip by now so, when one of the Rotarians pleaded for some help in moving some boxes of books, I put up my hand. He said he had 85 boxes, culled from the Devonport Library and he wanted to put them in a storage container until they could be sent overseas. The plan was to do it on Thursday but the weather was foul so we postponed until the first sunny day, which turned out to be Friday.

The boxes were in a Rotary shed in Deloraine. Not all of them were packed well; some were in manageable sizes, others were just thrown into loose boxes of all odd sizes, so packing them neatly was a problem. Someone had carefully marked the weight on the heavier ones and I was surprised to see how many were over 25Kg. Surely librarians shouldn’t be asked to move boxes as heavy as that. And neither should elderly Rotarians.

Anyway, we had two station wagon-type vehicles and a small enclosed trailer. We had to move the books to a spot about 30Km away so one trip was our goal. We packed the wagons until we thought the springs were sagging just enough and started on the little trailer. We had enough volume to get in all the remaining boxes but weight was always going to be the problem, especially as we noticed half-way through that the trailer had a flat tyre. By this stage, we were beyond unloading what was already in place so off we went to collect a compressor.

The trailer did take all the books and there was enough clearance to get our fingers between the wheels and the arches and Steen, who was pulling the thing was happy. He must have been worried all the way because he never got over 80 Km per hour and the other drivers on the highway were not pleased.

The container was half-full of old school furniture which will eventually end up in the Philippines but there was enough room for our books as well. I did my sums: 85 boxes at an average of 20Kg per box is 1700 Kg and only two people to move it. No wonder my leg is just as sore today as it was last week.

We’re still perusing available cruises. The Asian cruise I wanted to do on November 11th turned out to have one or two problems. Although it was listed as sailing from Beijing, the port is actually at Tientjin, 180 Km from Beijing airport. To join the ship we would have to fly into an airport we had never visited before and meet up with a limousine driver booked via the internet, and then find our ship in one of the busiest ports in Asia. What could possibly go wrong? We decided that there must be an easier way to go on a cruise. We’re now looking again at cruises leaving from Sydney, and sooner rather than later.

Wednesday, 17th August …..

It was our Rotary meeting last night. I’ve been quite slack recently and have missed a few meetings through a combination of a car which was not in peak condition and an unwillingness to make the one-hour drive to Deloraine. Because we were expecting to be away until this week, I had applied for Leave of Absence so was under no obligation to attend. The rules of Rotary state that members should attend 50% of meetings at their own club in any 6-month period, unless they have approved Leave. Why are people so ready to accept rules which limit their freedom of movement? It’s almost as if we realise we need an imposed discipline or we’ll become lazy.

Anyway, I was Chairman last night so I had an obligation to make every effort to be there. The business of the meeting was to discuss various questions regarding the running of the Club. It’s called Club Assembly and happens every month or so. There were just two items for discussion last night: requirements of membership (attendance, etc); and views on home-hosting visitors.

Like most Rotary Clubs, we have a number of members who ignore the rule I mentioned before and just don’t turn up regularly. We should get rid of them, of course, but nobody wants to give up members if we can help it. After twenty minutes of going around in circles, we once again handed the matter off to the Membership Committee to sort out. That’s what we normally do when this concern comes up for discussion.

The second issue is an interesting one. In the next few months, we will have visitors from a Sydney club who have offered to help out at the Craft Fair, young people on an exchange from somewhere in the US, Rotarian from New Zealand, and members of our two sister-clubs in the Philippines. Each group will stay for 2 to 3 days and will require home-hosting. Unfortunately, Marilyn and I can’t take more than one small visitor at a time; our little one-bedroom cottage isn’t set up for that. When sister-in-law Janet comes down in November, she will stay in our little visitor’s nook, but it’s too cosy for sharing and Rotary visitors usually come in pairs.

On the way home in the car, I listened to the local ABC station. Annie Warburton has a quiz each night from about 8 oçlock. The questions aren’t particularly hard but I find it so frustrating to hear some of the people who ring in. They seem to be immune to embarrassment and are quite prepared to show their ignorance to everyone who is listening. I would have thought that the best thing to do when you don’t know the answer is to hang up and let someone else have a go. But no, callers beg for a clue, ask anyone who is in the same room as they are and generally parade their lack of knowledge. Nobody can know everything and it is better to admit it and not draw attention to it.

Sunday, August 14th …..

Friday was a beautiful day. I had an appointment in Burnie which is about 165Km away so we decided Marilyn would come with me for the drive and we would have lunch out.

Our friend Greg Leong is Director of the Burnie Art Gallery and I wanted to ask him to be a judge in the Hoffman Challenge Quilting Competition which has now become part of the Craft Fair. Greg has a long involvement with the Arts and is an internationally-recognised Textile Artist. He’s been involved with the Craft Fair, on and off, for years but the first time I met Greg was in 2007 when I arranged for him to have a retrospective display of some of his extraordinary Chinese-inspired and Australian-influenced costumes and quilts. If you look more closely at a seemingly-Chinese dress, you will see tiny embroidered kangaroos. The attached picture is a Carmen dress made of flannelette.

Burnie is a funny town. When we first lived in Tasmania in the 1970s and 80s, Burnie was the wild west. It was most famous for The Pulp, a dirty, smelly pulp mill. The pollution around the town, especially on the foreshore was appalling and in the 1990s, I think, there was a real push to clean up their act. By 2000, the Pulp was essentially closed down and the environmental cleanup was completed. Burnie still thrives although there is very little industry now. Woodchip is exported from the wharf and it is still a major container port, but you are just as likely to see a cruise ship tied up than a cargo ship.

Marilyn and I sailed in there on the Volendam in January 2008. Hordes of people got off the ship to have rushed trips to Cradle Mountain, local wineries, Gunns Plains Zoo, or just to wander down the main street. The big tourist attraction of the town is Creative Paper, a paper-making concern famous for its Roo Paper, made from Kangaroo droppings. Another friend, Joanna Gair, developed this when she was Director of Creative Paper but I prefer the Whisky paper she made for a Scottish Distillery. Apparently you can make paper from any old fibre.

Nowadays, paper-making workshops are held in the new Visitors’Centre. For lunch we went to Fish Frenzy, which is right on the waterfront. Being such a beautiful day, we bought takeaway – two flake fillets and large chips, beautifully cooked and served in paper pokes (heavy paper cones).

It was a great day out. Greg agreed to be a judge and it was worth the drive just to enjoy the lunch.