Saturday 3rd June

PJ O'Rourke re the good old days:  Let me say one single word: dentistry.

He is so right!  The islander people we met on our trip were for the most part extremely good looking.  Genetically gifted, in fact.  On remote Budi-Budi, far-flung in the Louisiades, most of the people could have been movie stars, with their beautiful cheekbones, tawny thick hair, flashing eyes.  But…as soon as they get to their twenties…their teeth rot and start to fall out.  (I won’t go into a gory description of betelnut and its contribution to dental decay…too yucky a topic, really.)  But I was often moved to think of P J O’Rourke… We, in Australia, are so lucky to have modern dentistry!  I am sure that if I lived in a remote islander community I would now be a toothless old hag… Instead I have most of my very own teeth, give or take the odd long-lost molar and more than one or two fillings.  And I expect to keep them forever.

Friday morning at dawn’s early light I went to my own dentist for a check-up, a cut & polish, and a fluoride treatment.  My dentist, Fiona, is a beautiful, kindly young woman.  When it was all over and I stepped out, crossed the road, and went to sit in my (freezing!!) office feeling very happy with the experience.  It was not ever thus… People of my generation all have horror stories of terrifying noisy drills, unkind shouty dentists, pain and misery.  We should all be extremely grateful that times have changed and that dentistry is so much better in every respect.

As I lay back in my comfy chair I did spare a thought for poor Sanity, on Bagaman Island in the Louisiades.  I am not sure how old Sanity is.  She looks about 99, but as her youngest child, Keith, is only twelve years old maybe she isn’t 99…. And why does she look 99?  Well because she has hardly any teeth left, and she is suffering dreadfully from an ulcer in her gums.  There is no chance at all of her getting any treatment for this.  Her son Moses paddled out in his canoe and asked if we had any medicine for her.  We felt so guilty because we hadn’t through to bring spare packs of antibiotics with us – we could have bought them over the counter in Vanuatu.  So we handed over some panadol and sent him on his way.  The next day he came back, beaming, to report that Sanity had slept all night happy and pain-free and that the huge swelling in her gum had receded!  We left a packet of magical drugs for her…I hope it was a miracle cure…

Friday 2nd June

Chris and Angela are having a most wonderful time in France.  I have been reading lovely long descriptive emails while sitting in my office with an inexplicably arctic blast of air-conditioning pouring down on my head.  I am almost transported to prehistoric caves, glorious chateaux, sumptuous restaurants, quaint villages and markets… Almost but not quite because…WHY is it so cold in here??  We have some workmen busily clambering around our heads in the roofspace, installing a new system.  A new FREEZING system, it seems to me.  I am wearing, over my normal wintry work clothes, a very ugly old hooded grey polar fleece and a big thick woolly scarf.  And I am still going brrr… My poor colleagues, Allan, Tim and James, are wandering around rubbing their hands and also going brrrr. 

So it is a wonderful distraction to read about early summer in the French countryside and “…our Michelin Star restaurant which was a 5 minute walk away along a beautiful river bank….was to die for!. Eat your heart out Heston!!!!”

So nice, to be able to share other people’s fabulous travel experiences – ain’t the internet grand??

Thursday 31^st May

When we had our wonderful few days up the Gordon River on the West coast, we spent some time tied up alongside Stormbreaker, the yacht which usually brings white-water rafters back from their energetic Franklin River trips.

This time it had been chartered by Aurora, or the Hydro, or whichever branch of what used to be our state electric company.  Our lovely friend James Butler was on board – I think I wrote about this at the time.  We had met James, most fortuitously, in Honiara, and here he was again, right where we wouldn’t expect to meet anyone we knew.  He and his colleague, Ray, were great company.  They played cards with us late into the night and in daylight hours they took us for a walk along a little track we would never have known about, in to Lake Fidler.  It is a beautiful little lake.  But not beautiful enough (for me…) to justify spending days, weeks, months sitting in a small wooden shelter, not much bigger than a phone box, on a hard bench… And this is what one of our Tasmanian scientists did, year after year, very happily.  I think he took a little tent and slept away happily on a layer of muddy grass.  Then he would wake up and spent the days sitting, cold, damp, uncomfortable, but…happy in his meticulous studies.  I wouldn’t like to get this wrong but I think this was Dr Peter Tyler, from the Botany Department at Tas Uni.  He is a renowned limnologist and I now know, because I looked it up, that:

Limnology also called freshwater science, is the study of inland waters

During my months on 2XS I listened to many podcasts, and to many audiobooks.  I was particular fascinated to learn about the way scientists work.  No I wasn’t downloading too much Learned Information; my information mainly came from the likes of Bill Bryson, David Attenborough, the Science Show on ABC Radio National – information nicely prepared for people who like to go Golly and Gosh and Well I Never without having to strain their brains too much.  ScienceLite, that’s my sort of thing.  I came to realise that dedicated scientists don’t take their own physicals comfort into account at all.  They spend years going to the far ends of the earth, living in extreme climates, never once saying, “Oh no that mattress is too hard, where is my fluffy pillow; how I long for a cup of tea…”  So it’s not all that surprising that Peter Tyler was so happy sitting in his little wooden hideaway, with a thermos of cocoa, nicely laced with rum, I hope, carefully studying his meromitic lake.

And what is a meromictic lake, I hear you cry??  James did explain it to me; I listened carefully and then completely forgot.  I couldn’t even remember the name, only that it began with M.  (Maybe…)  Google is my friend and with a bit of luck and fair weather I found some research papers, and Peter Tyler’s name, so now you too know about meromictic lakes…

Lake Fidler is an ectogenic meromictic lake with a monimolimnion maintained by periodic incursions of brackish water from the lower Gordon River estuary.  A dam across the middle reaches of the Gordon River has restricted these incursions of brackish water and meromictic stability has rapidly declined.

So… Golly and Gosh and Well I Never and I see now why I completely forgot when James explained it all to me…

Wednesday 30th May

On the news today…a great leap forward for the Tasmanian economy…

Salmon farmers today were given the go-ahead to create the largest fish farming area in the country.  The $88 million marine farm expansion in Macquarie Harbour will create 100 jobs and another 160 production and processing positions…

This is expansion from 564 hectares to 926 hectares.  A huge increase!!

I don’t generally like to be too oppositional, or too doom-and-gloom…but is this really a good thing for the waters of Macquarie Harbour??  Or for the poor caged fish, for that matter…much as I like eating them…and much as the population of Strahan, and in fact of the whole of Tasmania, will benefit.

Tuesday 29th May

Live in such a way that if anyone should speak badly of you no-one would believe it

I read this recently on another blog (Maxabella Loves, if you want to go and look…)  It came printed on a lovely square photo, all very pretty, and yes…a great motto to try to live up to… Am not so sure that I have quite achieved this particular stage and status…or ever will I can imagine all manner of people saying, “Well golly and gosh, she always was a frivolous and flighty bit of work, not surprised to hear that at all!”

On a completely different topic – Eurovision is over!  And oh what a spectacle!  I am sad to report that my favourites didn’t do very well.  In fact, they came last and second last in the finals.  And glorious Iceland, so pretty, so tuneful, did slightly better but wasn’t even in the top ten.

It gave me much pleasure and amusement last week to hear not one but two of my very favourite men in the world asking, in all seriousness, why Australia has never entered in this contest.  Ummm…I rather think there is a clue in the name…EUROvision??” 

(Dad?  Pete?  What were you thinking??)

Monday 28^th May

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away

Or in 1967, in Holland, to be exact, I met my Dutch cousins. They were all great fun and very kind to me.  I very much admired Liesbeth and Carel, glorious twins, very sophisticated, by dint of being a whole 13 months older than I was… (I was 17 in 1967…)  I haven’t seen them since then.  Liesbeth lives in a small town near Lincoln in the UK; Carel lives in Pennsylvania.  In September Dad got an email, in Dutch, from Carel, which he forwarded to me, translated for ease of reading…

Apparently Carel had been reading my blog and had written about a very intrepid sailing trip he undertook when he was in his early 50s:

By the way, I also once , about ten years ago, participated in a long sailing trip in a 30 ft. “zeilboot” (yacht) belonging to a Dutch friend, who sailed from the Netherlands via West Africa, South America (Surinam, Aruba) North America and back to the Netherlands.  It was a very small yacht with four adults aboard.  I was the youngest, so I had the worst watch, from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.  I joined the tour in Columbia, sailed around Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and then back to the USA.  Unbelievable trip.  Courageous on my cousin’s part to do that sort of thing in the Pacific.

I actually think it was more courageous on MY cousin’s part, to undertake such a long trip in a 30’ boat…

Sunday 27^th May

During the odd idle moment, I have been reading book reviews.  There is a lot of comment on the internet about Game of Thrones, which is both a weighty book (over 900 pages…) and a lavish TV series.  It is receiving rave reviews, and the still photos I have seen are just astonishing, so beautiful, so creative.  So when my friend Chris said she was reading the book, I was spurred on to download it on my iPad.  900 pages is much too big to read in paper form; so heavy, so unwieldy – I so love my iPad!  As far as I know, Chris never reads fantasy books…so Game of Thrones must be a real winner!

And yes it is very well written, very powerful, with strong characters, intricate plot lines.  My problem is…I just dread returning to it each night.  I pick up my iPad with a faint shudder, and squeeze my eyes a bit shut to prepare myself the fresh drama, intrigue, horror.  I have in fact sopped reading it for the moment; it is still there, on my iPad, open at the page where I left it – the slaughter of Lady the direwolf and of poor little Arya’s raggedy butcher-boy friend, Mycah, is still vivid in my mind…

On our way to work on Wednesday, I told Jeff about my cowardly abandonment of Game of Thrones – when the going gets tough the tough keep reading, surely??  That night he brought me a snippet from the newspaper – something which had appeared on Twitter:

Game of Thrones is like Twitter.  There are 140 characters and something awful is always happening.

Indeed!