transavante

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Ain’t doin nuttin.

Saturday is a lay day. Yesterday I drove into the property in the morning, tomorrow I leave in the afternoon. Today is the only get up go to bed on the property day. In the media they call it a slow news day, a day when they dust off some story about a three legged dog or turtle farming in the pacific or some such because there isn’t much else happening. Now, enjoyable as it is to be out here, ‘naked on the face of the earth’, lol, there isn’t too much to write about and although I am new to the world of blogging I have read enough to know that although some find recounting their daily events inspiring to themselves it may not be quite as captivating to others. ‘Got up this morning and put my slippers on, walked to the kitchen and turned the jug on to make coffee like I do every morning. I always like two sugars in my coffee and on Sundays there is nothing better to read the Sunday paper but today I drink my coffee and then brush my teeth…always use bottled water, and then…and then… and then’. No, save me from this verbal diarrhoea.

Now, one of the things I like about coming out here is doing nothing. Yep, I love to drive three and a half hours north of Katoomba down many kilometres of dirt road, through cattle paddocks and creek crossing to arrive and do nothing then later pack up and go home. You know, doing nothing ‘is’ doing something. Not everyone can do nothing. It is a practiced art and I am fairly good at it. We have all heard said that the world has become so hectic these days and as our standard of living, measured ironically in purchasing power, increases we are becoming time poor. Cash rich/time poor. Everyone seems to be expected to work longer and harder and society seems to drawn us into a momentum. Time is precious. So, when many come to a remote location like this it can be a little confronting. No mobile phone, SMS, internet, dial a pizza, video shop, computer games. I have seen people come out here at a total loss at what to do. We seem to be programmed to be doing something. We wake in the morning then set about with the things that need to be done. If nothing needs to be done we find things that need to be done. We need to keep the momentum, to move forward, keep active. I suppose I use my time out here as a punctuation mark, a place to briefly take a pause, stand still for a moment then move forward. It is a place where doin nothing is doing something.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Good Friday

Good Friday.

Should this be good Good Friday. Well, bus 1073 is now sitting back at the depot, fuelled with the keys on the hook. She will sit there for two weeks now as it is school holidays in NSW and someone else will take the wheel from here after. This morning I have driven the 200 odd klm’s from Katoomba to a place affectionately called the ‘Wombat House’. It is a secluded 100 acre property owned by various family members, friends and so on. It is absolutely remote and surrounded by National Park. It borders the Wollemi National Park to the south and the Gouldburn River National Park to the north. It is actually a freehold title and exists as an island surrounded by national park. National Parks would love to buy the title and add it to their park system but they might be waiting a while for that. The property has acted as a bit of a retreat and escape hatch for over ten years now. The house, or rather cabin/hut, has a little history. The house was bought off a couple of hillbilly brothers who we later found had been growing dope for sale to a ready market in Newcastle. We found out later still that one of the brothers was shot dead by police in a drugs raid a few years after we had bought the property. Another surprise some ten years later was the concealed underground room below the floor of the cabin, obviously a dope drying and storage area. Luckily though the dope history ended at the time of purchase of the property. Don’t think we would have been too happy, or felt particularly safe, if leather clad bikies had been travelling out here with pockets full of cash looking to score and been mighty peeved at wasting their time travelling so far for nought. I suppose it is some credit to the previous owners that they didn’t do business from their property. Hell, the only herb that grows out here is an amazing rosemary plant that seems to survive everything.

I don’t get out here too often. In summer it is far too hot, I mean really hot. Around 40 C. There is no power out here so it is all fairly basic. I suppose that is part of the appeal. There is something energising about sitting around a fire, basic cooking and talking rather than TV. We have been bringing our children out here since they were crawling and getting entangled in ‘tiger pear’ was a bigger danger than the more mundane suburban, eat button/fall down stairs. About four years ago my five year old nephew came into the cabin on new years eve obviously distraught. My sister asks him what’s wrong Will? “Snake bite me”! Oh shit, this is going to be a New Years Eve like no other. Outside the hut there is a King Brown snake, two and a half metres long. Oh hell, is this going to be the tragedy of the Wombat House? Luckily no. The Care Flight helicopter was duly dispatched from Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital and within twenty minutes young Will was being air lifted to send NYE in Newcastle with his story splashed as a good news story across local television and newspapers the next day. One reporter asked Will, ‘how big was the snake’ and Will put his hand apart as wide as he could and said, “huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge!”

I suppose we can do without such excitement. Most times out here it is fairly tame and eventless. It is an opportunity to unplug from the modern world and contempt life with out the gadgets and gismos. I suppose it is a way of being naked, figuratively. We live in a world with everything at your finger tips and at instant call or beckoning? Food, services, electronics are often evaluated in just how quickly it/they can be made available and consumed. So, it is nice to escape to a world from time to time where things take time and there is not one thing in the house that beeps at you, nothing that needs to be recharged, no power adapters, no LED lights to illuminate the corners of the room at night, no street lights, no barking dogs. Just a whole lot of nothing, naked on the face of the earth. That is the Wombat House. And that is where I leave this blog sitting in total darkness sitting at my laptop. OK, OK sitting at a laptop is not exactly a total escape from the modern world I suppose but at least I am writing, constructing and being creative in some degree whereas I could be sitting here watching a DVD engaged in someone else’s world. Good Friday, goodnight.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Good Thursday

Thursday 13th of April 2006. Nothing much happened on this day or at least not that I am aware of. I am sure if I had a look in a ‘On this Day’ book or trawled the internet I would find some important person had been born on this day, or died, or that some record had been broken, some famous person married or murdered … who knows, the world is full of memorable events and moments in time. Here I am trying to write about Thursday the 13th of April 2006 and it is already a day old. How is that? I want to start a blog about my journey forward and I start by writing about yesterday? Today is Friday, that’s Good Friday. Now there is a day with significance! Why not just start here, Good Friday. It could start something like, Today is Good Friday, I chose to start my blog here, the first day of Easter as a symbolic departure point on my blog journey. But no, I have to start with a yesterday, the day ‘before’ Good Friday. Thursday 13th of April 2006 my ‘Good Thursday’.

Dawn breaks rather spectacularly on Good Thursday in Katoomba at around 6.00 am. It is not unusual for me to see dawn break. I have been getting up at this time for years now. The really funny thing is that every day I wake up well before the alarm goes off at 6.00 am but every night I always set the alarm for the next day. You know, you would think that after ten odd years of turning the alarm off before it goes off you might just think, dam it, I don’t need that alarm anymore. But no, every night just before I climb into bed I reach for the alarm and check it is set. OK, so getting up at dawn is no big deal for me but yesterday, Thursday 13th June 2006 is the very first time I have photographed it before going to work. Here it is,






It is not such a bad sunrise as far as sunrises go and as good as any to start my blog. Actually, I would have been just as keen to start on this day had it been raining and blowing a gale. It was just a happy coincidence that it began with a clear and welcoming sky. The truth is I would have taken a photo regardless of how the morning started, I’d decided that the night before. So, although I sit at my laptop here the day after constructing text my blog really did start yesterday with my camera. I started my blog visually and continued that through the day. I like writing but my greater passion is images and it is probably only appropriate for me to start my blog in a more emotional way. Images are emotional, text is intellectual and while I give both credit I trust emotion a little more than intellect.

Having placed my blog, if a little crudely, in a position in time I suppose I should also give it a little context. Actually, I have just decided I don’t think I will give you too much context at all. I could go over the years and events of my life that have delivered me here kicking and screaming in my middle age but no, I have just decided to skip that. There is something a little tragic about getting too romantic about the past for me. It is a bit like the radio stations that play, ‘nothin but the hits from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s’ There is a whole breed of radio stations, ‘generation radio’ whose audience is committed to when music was ‘real’. It is like life progress in a linear fashion then at some point someone grabs a pair of scissors and cuts that linear progrssion and creates a tape loop of what has been, game over. This is the baby boomer middle age generation to which I belong. A largely affluent generation able to spend like no generation before and perhaps to come. Now, I suppose what I ‘should’ do is re finance the house, buy a red convertible or Harley Davidson and spend the weekend either polishing or driving my expensive toy and sit back and dream about my superannuation payout at age 65. No, think I’ll pass on that. So, Good Thursday is the day I tear up the script. Sentimentality has a place but not as a lifestyle.

Moving right along after the dawn. I first started driving school buses in the Blue Mountains when I first moved here then had a break of about nine years to go to uni and then work in Sydney then recently moved back up the mountains to spend more time with my daughter who now lives with me on a week about basis. Driving is a fairly easy casual job, two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. I have been doing this as well as running a fairly upmarket guest house. I don’t really need to drive the school buses but I actually enjoy annoying the children with my bad jokes and singing opera and I just love the smell of stale peanut butter sandwiches.



Anyway, I do lie a little. I have decided there must be something wrong with getting up early every morning. If only school started at 11.00 am. But no, I am 7.00 am out of Katoomba for Springwood, route 526. Or, at least I was. On Good Thursday it was with great joy and anticipation that I started bus 1073 for what I knew was going to be my last journey down the mountain to Springwood High School. As I climbed on board to start the bus I know that this was the beginning of my journey. I built up air, closed the doors and I was off.





Now, just to prove to you that I am regressing I need to introduce to you a companion. Meet Tiananmen Square otherwise know as Miss T or T square. I suppose you are entitled to ask what is a middle age man is doing with a two headed Chinese doll/thingo. I wish I could give you a quick answer. Dam it, this is a blog isn’t it? Who needs quick answers! T square is the much loved two headed doll of my daughter Meagan. She has two other all time favourite dolls, chocky and roast rabbit. I know, you are already starting to wonder, what kind of a guy gives his daughter one doll named after a place best known for a massacre and another rabbit doll named roast rabbit? Good question!

To answer this you have to understand one thing. Dad jokes are supposed to be nerdy. Dad jokes are supposed to annoy children. They have to be humourous enough when your children are young but shocking enough that your children want to leave home early. We have all heard dad jokes and sayings like when passing a cemetery that it is the ‘dead centre of town’ and that people are ‘dying to go there’ or when your child says that something is not fair you say, ‘neither is a black horses bottom’. Did you hear about the man who goes to the zoo but when he arrives there is only a dog!! ......it was a shitzu. I remember a particularly nerdy joke from high school where a mate said, “I can speak Japanese” I replied, “yeah, what can you say”. He replied, “Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi” So you see, when it came to naming the two headed Chinese doll/thingo that grandma had given my daughter we were trying to think of a fitting Chinese name. The dad humour had to draw back to my adolescence and came up with Tiananmen Square, an event still vivid in my mind. Well, that joke took about ten years to play out.

Anyway, I have decided I needed a travel companion and as my daughter will be otherwise occupied with school I decided T square would be the perfect travelling companion. She has a perfectly curved back and ideal for a pillow and if I am ever harassed or in dire trouble with terrorists wanting to relocate my head from my body I can grab T square from my backpack, start cuddling her like a four year old child, speaking incoherently and drooling at the mouth and play the part of an imbecile. Less generous people might say it is a role I could adopt easily, lol! Truth is, Miss T is a tangible link to both my mother and my daughter and it will be good to have her along for the ride.

Therefore, it was only appropriate that Miss T came with me on my final bus run on Good Thursday.











So that's it. Good Thursday came to pass. But there was one last thing. The day had began with an extraordinary sunrise so it seemed just prefect for the day to be bookended with a similar sunset.



Cheak out all the photos here