Day pod Tuesday 31st March
I tried to contact the camping trip Adventure Company direct yesterday only to have emails pinged back as their addresses were closed; a victim of the shut -down. Just as well we booked the trip through Perth YHA and the manager there, Mel is systematically working through the mountain of refunds. Somewhere in that pile is our claim.
We went for an evening stroll yesterday and there were few others around. Just a few fishermen and a pair of pelicans. They are such magnificent birds, big and beautiful with their oversized beak and mournful eyes. I awoke this morning thinking that if they can live here and be happy so can we, simplistic I know but it’s a base line to start from. Later in the evening we watched two episodes of A Handmaid’s Tale followed by the first episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo just to balance the horror with a little humour.
The overnight rain and low cloud cover is now being burned away by the sun, so we’ll be off for our exercise soon. Stay well, look after each-other and have a good new day.)
Twelve days ago seems like an age now, as historian Lord Peter Hennessy suggests, BC (Before Coronavirus as opposed to AC), and the 19th March dawned another beautiful day as if the weather was in defiance of the global crisis. We took part in this defiance by walking towards Kings Park or Karrgatup, the elevated 400 hectare area of natural bushland and cultivated gardens with wide vistas still beloved by the Nyungar people, including Walter McGuire.
To get there we explored lightly populated public areas of the city centre, self-isolating in the CBD almost and then came to Mount Street, a very steep street otherwise and more accurately known as Cardiac Hill. On both sides were upmarket homes and apartment blocks, homes of the rich freshened with sweet scented flowering frangipani trees and luxuriant low level bushes. Puffing I reached the top and the formal avenue of trees of the park stood tall before us.
Around the back of the commercial area of restaurants and Aspects, a craft and design shop, is the car park where we would meet Nyungar elder Walter McGuire. I think I mentioned to you that our friend Tyronne Bell from Canberra suggested we get to know him and we were delighted to spend two hours with him along with a lady from Perth called Pauline. He and his wife Meg run the Go Cultural Tours and he straight away told us his two daughters were both away from home. One daughter was literally on a flight back from her sturdies in Canada and after our time with him he would be driving to the airport to collect her. He was clearly looking forward to this reunion with happiness and relief.
He is a traditional owner of the lands on which Perth now stands and he has a very pragmatic view of the first nation experience since the arrival of the first Europeans. “It has happened, it is history and there were misdeeds on both sides.” His view of Perth is one through the eyes of pride in ownership and title and his vision for the future is one of tolerance and benevolent humanity. He is a warm and welcoming man who loves to tell of his history but also of the culture of his people today which he is determined to keep alive and is of relevance right now as he told us that after all the cancellations he has recently received we will be his last tour until the global epidemic is sent packing.
A question was formulating in my mind but I didn’t want to break his train of thought so we went on listening to his softly spoken story. Pauline read out the terms of the Certificate of Exemption whereby First Nation people were invited to throw off all aspects of their original identity in order to become part of European Perth life. It was dated March 1951, the year before I was born. The injustice of it for me was made less serious by the fact it is no longer relevant or applicable and there is some recognition of the Nyungar people as being the first, present and ongoing guardians of the land. Tongue in cheek he told us of how the high rise city buildings are built on the many lakes you see in the picture and how the water beneath the buildings has to be pumped into the Swam River constantly.
I imagined the view from Goodinup and Goonininnup without the modern high rises, when sunlight glistened on the waters as the aborigines paddled their canoes and fished in the clean waters of the lakes. Walter’s great great grandmother lived then and would have been a little girl in one of the canoes or splashing on the foreshore with her siblings. She was the last Queen of the Nyungar and was called Fanny Yooreel Balbuk and is the lady in white on the right hand side of the photo. Walter had a delightful story to tell us about her. As she grew up so the first European settlers arrived to make a life in this harsh but beautiful land to which they were not suited.
As a grown woman she resented the white picket fences that were erected to enclose homesteads and land across the ancient pathways her people had walked for thousands of years. So on her daily perambulations she would kick the fences, uproot the posts and cast them aside in disgust, much to the obvious annoyance of the newcomers.
Her actions have become a part of the Nyungar folklore and became the basis for their claim to title of the lands when they submitted it to the Western Australian Government. The terms of the title are still being worked out and the fear is that the longer it takes the more watered down they will be.
However it was good to see Walter was making a good business out of telling his stories, or had been rather, which brings me to my question.
“Walter with all your tours cancelled what will you do now?”
“I will take my family and we will go into the bush. We know how to survive and hunt there and that’s where we will be until this is all over.” I was glad for him and impressed by his versatility.
He finished his tour by singing us a farewell song accompanied by clapping two boomerangs together, then he climbed into his maroon 4X4 and sped off to the airport.
Perth’s Botanic Beauty – A Wandering Boab Tree and the Homeless Honeysuckle
You can guess from the photo that the vegan plateful I consumed for my lunch after we said goodbye to Walter was the most delicious in a long time. Rob’s Caesar salad was laden with chicken, so we were both well-nourished for a look around the abundant gardens that cover the hillside looking towards the Indian Ocean.
The whole area looks completely natural despite the planters having brought together native flora from numerous different climate regions of Australia. The boab tree had a long journey from the Kimberleys and is still recovering from the wounds as you can see and I thought the name Homeless Honeysuckle was poignant until I read that it would be re-introduced into a recently purchased 40 ha area of ideal habitat. At least some people are on its side.
Access to the gardens is easy by foot or car and as we walked around the far extremity near the roadside we spotted the little honey eater taking refreshment and quite unafraid of us. The very next day after we had walked over the steel bridge you see in the picture it was closed and we wondered if people would also be barred from relaxing in this lovely area of Kings Park. If they are it will be a blow to many people, including the two carers with their one helmeted and the other wheelchair bound wards taking respite in the peace and beauty surrounding them.
Last of the Summer Wine
Day Pod 1st April
There is a cooling of the air temperature now when the sun is not shining, reminding us that autumn is approaching. We bit the bullet yesterday and walked the entire length of the long beach on the Sound, 50 minutes one way and a little longer on the way back because I kept stopping to look at things like little birds and the sweet smelling flowers outside a holiday village. We walked along the beach and back along the cycle/pathway, in good use as folk exercise at arms-length.
Carole and John from the cat have loaned us the full DVD set of Howard’s Way, the Solent based sailing story dating from 1985. I was living in Lymington at the time it was made and used to enjoy seeing all our favourite haunts appearing on the TV screen. When the story was approaching its final sixth series I remember the news report that one of the lead characters, Tom Howard, (Maurice Colbourne) had died while out jogging before the filming was due to start. It seemed sad now to watch the programme knowing that, but then I thought this is part of his legacy, so we will continue to escape into that unknown to us world of the sailing elite!
Coincidentally we were talking to another Maurice this morning. Remember I mentioned that BC (!) he would race in his etchel to Albany daily against his friend. Well the yacht in the picture is him returning yesterday after a perfect sail there and back. We met him on the quay this morning and he told us he bought some stores at the IGA supermarket but apart from that Albany was a ghost town.
For Darren I imagined life was pretty normal, with running the yard, lifting boats, cleaning them off and putting them back in and all the odd jobs and admin to do. He confirmed this is so. I asked him why there were so many tinny towing vehicles in the car park today when other days the park is empty.
“Perfect day for tuna fishing today and lots of families are taking their kids out as something to occupy them. My daughter has just sent me some photos of the conditions out there, and they’re really nice.” Tomorrow strong winds are due so they are making hay while the sun shines.
Rob has now cleaned four of the ten winches and has made the concerted decision to leave the next two until tomorrow and we have registered with the British High Commission in Canberra’s ‘British Travellers in Australia Registry’ as suggested by Jeremy and Kathy.
Tomorrow the last historic blog about Perth will bring you up to date, so I think that calls for a celebration, don’t you? Take care.
Away with the Birdies
(Day Pod 2nd April
The water in the beakers on the table wobbles with every gust that whacks Zoonie on her side. We are opting for two short walks today as the thunderous clouds threaten rain at any moment and we choose to stay close to home. Perfectly aerodynamic pelicans glide in to land into the wind on the crowded pontoons like A380s on final descent.
Swimmers in wetsuits emerge to grab towels making us feel we should ‘make more effort’ at this alternative exercise. The car park is empty as white caps scoot across King George Sound making it unsafe for the armada of little tinnies and hundreds of seagulls and pelicans cover the swimming pool pontoons, sheltering.
Some friends and neighbours of Malcolm and Christine, Doreen and Trevor who we visited very briefly on our day tour with our hosts, have very kindly offered us the use of their holiday home a short distance from here on the way in to the Albany suburbs. It is a very kind and attractive offer for the occasional break and we are formulating a plan to stay there for a couple of days soon so Rob can go on from there to do a shop while I set the washing machine going! Many farmers in the grain belt of WA have holiday homes here and we would be only too pleased to check on Doreen and Trevor’s pad for them as they are not allowed to travel so far for non-essential reasons.
Latest update on the loo spider is that he has now moved onto the door and he has very hairy legs I noticed from seeing him sideways on with the light behind him, before I fled next door.
We had a video chat with Martina this morning. We met in Fulanga, Fiji and then stayed with them in Newcastle twice as we passed by. They now have a rescue Jack Russell called Nala and because all four grownup children and one girlfriend are self-isolating at home this new little addition is getting lots of walks and spend her off-walk time fast asleep. Martina says she has become a wonderful distraction for all of them.)
In Perth on the day before our trip we were planning our return to Zoonie, whenever that would be. Rob was seen quickly by a doctor at the station medical centre to get his prescriptions renewed and then we checked out the train and bus services back to Kojonup to pick up the car. We would be using them, as you know, much sooner than we had hoped.
We returned to the Youth Hostel to cook a big meal using up our remaining food and then headed out looking for a bar where we could guarantee our 4sq foot personal space. Upstairs in the Aviary there was just one group of office workers around a big table enjoying the last of their social contact for a while, so we located towards the street side looking over the tree tops and watching birds swooping around oblivious of mankind’s turmoil.
In the glossy colour brochure of Perth there is a photo of couples sitting and supping at tables, enjoying the bar, bathed in sunshine, kerching smiles and bonhomie abounding and it will again one day I thought.
A young man with a clicker was keeping a continual count on the number of clients before he would have to tell them to wait for the allowed space to become available. With the good natured feel there was a hint of anxiety, how far would all this go?
Life in Lockdown
It is now the twenty fifth day since our return to Zoonie and we are still sane. Each day has a gentle structure to it as do the weeks. After breakfast Rob does Zoonie jobs, including now servicing and fitting a new switch to the windlass, at present it is not playing ball and working but he will trace the cause, I have total faith.
I have been making strides on finishing my book and then have other projects in mind. I wrote the story of Graham the green Dinosaur to our oldest grandson Henry this morning. Graham was originally buried in the sand on the beach in Poole by Henry, and now he has turned up here!! It is wonderful now that both he and Ruby are writing to us regularly, I feel so much closer, it really shortens the miles.
We get at least an hours exercise in each day, this may be a walk on which there is always something new to enjoy. We returned at dusk one evening to find two kangaroos grazing just under Zoonie’s bow, a pair as one was bigger than the other. Another time a bandicoot dashed along the path away from us, 10 times bigger than a mouse and prettier than a rat. Another morning there were hundreds of small blue jellyfish washed up, some still alive. Their tentacles could reach over a metre in length for a small fish. They were all gone the next day.
There are many sandy trails around here presumably from olden times and lots of broken down sheep fencing but the natural shrub has grown back leaving just these enticing trails. It doesn’t matter at all if one gets lost because they all come out on the local roads. The photo of Rob pointing to the Norfolk pine marks the outward limit of one of our walks and we are very careful not to walk under the branches of these trees, as you can see the cones are big, heavy and spiky and I rate one’s chances of survival after being hit on the head with one would be somewhere near zero.
Rob does the shopping as there is only supposed to be the one of us in the store at a time while I plod on at the computer. The internet is a blessing all the more at this time isn’t it, I’ve even friended on Messenger a lady aboard a 45 foot Oyster locked down in the Galapagos where their food shopping is brought to them onboard.
We do not look too far ahead as nothing is certain about when the lockdown will end globally, but common sense would suggest that opening up country borders to visitors will be the last thing on the governments’ minds.
In the evening at the moment, after supper we have a three day cycle of games, Scrabble (very much our own rules) Tri-ominoes and 3/5 Dominoes. They all last an hour or so by which time we are ready for a bit of viewing. At present its Howard’s Way one night, kindly loaned to us by Carole and John from the big cat at the end they are building, and Killing Eve on the other night.
One cold morning we discovered the Ebespacher heater works and Rob thinks it didn’t recently just (after the new thermostat was fitted) because the air temperature was too high, it didn’t matter before when the thermostat wasn’t working anyway, but now we have the new thermostat we have a new situation.
It has been enjoyable getting to know the other folks in the yard. The photos of Baudin coming through the pass were welcomed by Darren who had a lovely Easter weekend anchored in a bay across King George Sound, snorkelling and relaxing. Craig, the police detective is working on his lovely little 1978 30 footer that has been in the family for yonks. He has promised her a major refit and now she is getting it. He started back at work on Tuesday after six weeks off and had to shave his two year old beard off so he could wear his face mask. He wasn’t too pleased at all that wasted nurturing and I didn’t recognise him at first when he turned up again.
So Boris is on the mend, thank goodness; we haven’t had such a charismatic PM for a long while and his speech of gratitude to the NHS was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s ‘from the heart monologues’, he seems to have taken a leaf from the biography he wrote about the great man.
And the Queen’s speech was timely and sincere and well written as usual.
We have learned we will get a refund of our Qantas flights minus £600 costs for the privilege of Qantas cancelling it, something not quite legal there me thinks. We should get something back for the 10 day camping trip which as you know shrank to two days and the one day Kimberley tour has already been refunded almost in total. We lost our refundable Broome to Perth flights but never mind.
All ten winches are now spinning nice and freely, but the windlass and all its bits is off to a friend of Mark’s, ‘Newby’ who is a bit of a wizard with recalcitrant machines.
We wear our wetsuits now for swimming. I suddenly couldn’t see the logic of wearing them in the tropics for snorkelling and then not wearing them down here at 35’ South. We also wear our snorkels so we can breathe without our heads bent up while we are swimming, and so we can say ‘high’ to all the little fish down there. I do 8 lengths at a time at the moment and find my aching neck is pain free for days afterwards.
Some friends of Malcolm and Christine who live near them in Kojonup offered us the use of their second home just up the road from here and it would have been nice but then I thought that folk have been told not to go to their holiday homes at present so our being there could arouse suspicion and a visitors to Aussie we do not want to run the risk of being thrown out and not allowed to return. So maybe at some later stage when the restrictions are lifted who knows maybe we will take them up on their kind offer, if only to have a BATH! Craig didn’t think we’d have a problem but we erred on the side of caution anyway.
As if CV is not enough the poor south west Pacific Islanders now have to contend with cyclone Harold wreaking havoc on the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga. It will be a different world when we come out of this.
Our American friend Gail is now busy at home in Houston sewing face masks on her machine for the cause and Alison and Randall are safely in Port Stephens Harbour for the duration. They will be plenty warm enough through the winter there. It will get cool and quite wet here but we will deal with it.
Zoonie is safely and conveniently placed right now so we are not planning to change that until August at least, when our original plans were to move with her up the west coast with the plan to exit from Carnarvon, something the Border Force say we should be able to do without a problem bearing in mind South Africa and the islands between may not be open to visitors, unless perhaps they self-quarantine for a fortnight upon arrival which is what other yachts are doing. At least it would get us moving west.
If we were in a marina it would be more expensive and her hull would be getting fouled up and if we were at anchor then we would have to move around to avoid inclement wind and our access to the shore for exercise and shopping would not be nearly so easy. Plus of course we are lucky enough to have the car.
So far eight people have the infection here in Albany and I guess they must be in the hospital either here or in Perth, it seems nowhere is escaping the virus.
Listening to some authors on the ABC RN one chap, Frank Snowden in his book ‘Epidemics and Society’ purports the concept that man is not central to the universe, nature is. A bit like saying the earth is not central to the universe, the sun is, (Nicolas Copernicus). Two profound truths, and perhaps one agrees with them, I do, but it will be interesting to see what the changes will be, good and bad, when we return to a new, temporary normality.
We like cycles don’t we, and I don’t just mean bicycles. Annual, weekly and daily cycles are reassuring concepts that we can look forward to coming around again with their elements of enjoyment and predictability. In our present world of uncertainty when the future organisation of society is in itself on the change, those cycles are even more important.
Many of us will have birthdays within the CV crisis and will look back on those occasions with relief that not only could we make our own celebrations but that the malevolent CV cycle is over.
On our weekly cycle here, despite the fact we are ‘retired’ or ‘keenagers’, we still work and our work is important to us as it grounds us and gives us direction, usefulness and purpose. So we look forward to the weekends when we try to do something not work related and a little different. Similarly we look forward to Fridays, when we buy fish ‘n’ chips from the ‘Squid Shack’ you see in the photo. Run by two young ladies their take-away business is keeping them going by locals who live here, daily fishermen and the likes of ourselves.
I hope you are all surviving well and remember, as each day goes by it is a day less to go to the end of our shared ordeal.
Rob’s Birthday morning spent with our dear friends Kathy and Jeremy will go down in our memories as being our first social get together for more than a chat following the relaxing of Western Australia’s lockdown rules. We went for a lovely walk around the nearby golf course in warm sunshine, passing fields where the local mob of kangaroos relaxed on the soft new green grass. They recline just as humans would, sometimes resting on one elbow while laying on their sides and they weren’t at all fussed by us walking by.
The barbecue area at Princess Royal Yacht Club was our venue for the picnic. Sal Darago, Jeremy and Kathy’s Westerly Solway Yacht home is moored in the Yacht Club marina. We maintained the one and a half metre social distancing rule by sitting poised at the four corners of the lovely big table you see in the photos and tucked into Prosecco, sandwiches, home-made beetroot hummus with parmesan and truffle oil crisps followed by a yummy vegan chocolate and raspberry cake. The wind grew from non-existent to slight but even then didn’t allow all 7 of the candles to stay alight. (One candle for each decade and one for luck, Rob turned 62)
The only negative was that because of the distancing rules we couldn’t take Jeremy and Kathy with us in the car to the wind farm, but maybe we will some day in the uncertain future.
Zoonie sat through her first winter storm last night and the tail of it will continue until this evening. Trying to sleep on board was like lying on a seat of the 19.15 Upminster to Ealing Broadway London Underground train on the District Line, including the bends!
Thunderbolts crashed around us and lightning lit up the cabin like a photo studio and then a million mice in tap shoes danced on the cabin roof. Still she is settled now and so are our nerves. We wanted to see how she fares in a storm, before we head north to spend some time living in a little cottage and spending lots of time within socially acceptable distances of our friends, Malcolm and Christine on their station. We will watch the stages of the CV crisis unfold from there knowing Zoonie is in good hands. Darren who owns the yard, being a sailor himself will understand if Zoonie needs any attention.
We had been looking forward to going to the wind farm since someone told us there were wonderful walks up there. In fact there is a coastal walk belonging to the Noongar Nation which runs from Albany nearly 1000 kms to beyond Perth where our two day camping trip turned back to the city. The views over the ocean were uplifting and we tentatively look forward to sailing offshore up the coast in Zoonie. I say tentatively because if we get away at the end of August, as planned pre CV, then there will be a Clapham junction of whale traffic out there, some going north while others moving south with their young and you know what I feel about very close proximity to whales! The humpback numbers have been increasing for years which is great news, if you are not trying to navigate amongst them and possibly incurring their wrath in the event of a collision. Still that’s a worry for the future and we can avoid most of them by sailing beyond the 400 metre depth contour from the coast.
The wind farm is a good example of modern technology working with the first nation people for a shared future. Just as its location lifted one high up to enjoy the beauty around us so it also lifts up one’s spirits to see an example of how productive and environmentally aware the path to the future can be; at the same time as providing a welcome invitation to the visitor to explore.