Burgess blog #5 - Monday 22 March

Burgess blog #5 – Monday 22 March

Where have we stayed since blog 4?

Blackwood (Adelaide Hills) – with friends Darren & Margie
Owen (north of Adelaide) – with friends Woody and Joy
Port Augusta – one night was enough
Coffin Bay NP (west of Port Lincoln)
Ceduna
Madura (along the Nullarbor)
Esperance
Bremer Bay
Padbury (Perth suburb) – with friends Candice and Warren

Adelaide

After some panic about the Forester’s oil usage (including a debate about what car we would buy next), things have settled down and we look forward to many more happy kilometres in our Forester. We think it is enjoying not having to pull the A’van anymore.

We spent a relaxing week with Darren, Margie, Amelia and Connor in Blackwood. A large factor in deciding to travel around Australia was the desire to catch up with friends along the way. One realises Australia is a big place with good friends so far away (we know how Carole King feels).

Canberra calls itself the bush capital, but can it compare to the Adelaide Hills? A plus is the wildlife (including a koala in Darren & Margie’s front yard) and the huge variety of birds. A minus is the bushfire risk.

Our time in Adelaide coincided with the Adelaide Festival, although not being arty farty (well, H is definitely not the former), we did not get so involved. Our main exposure to the Festival was a special menu at Red Ochre, Australia’s first bush food restaurant. A guest chef had arranged this amazing menu to coincide with the Festival based around offal and bone marrow, including such delights as offal soufflé! We tried very hard to find something we were prepared to ‘fork’ out good money to eat, but to no avail. K could not control her laughter as the dishes reminded her of human anatomy and medical procedures. The last time she saw bone marrow was in a bag ready for a transfusion. Darren, a doctor, also saw the funny side and much to H’s embarrassment it was decided that we could not eat from the menu choices that apparently true foodies are willing to pay an arm and a leg for. The door was too far away and right past the chefs in the kitchen for a quick escape, so Darren (the bravest amongst us) told the waiter that we were sadly leaving. Thankfully the standard menu miraculously appeared, and we enjoyed some beautiful dishes such as emu and duck. The night was saved. H still maintains bush tucker is the way to go and urges Canberra readers to get along to the local bush food eatery, Ironbark in Manuka. He promises no arty farty menus, just good old-fashioned kangaroo and bogong moth frittata (when in season – the chef Kurt Gruber catches them with a net at Parliament House).

This is a good time to list some further beautiful spots that nature offers for alfresco dining. Since our last blog we have:
• Picnicked at Goolwa at the mouth of the Murray
• Dined with the birds at Coffin Bay National Park
• Eaten tuna pasta in the red dirt and under the stars at Madura (midway between Ceduna and Esperance)
• Drunk coffee from the billy in Fitzgerald River National Park while watching out for an elusive seal in the ocean

Further on food, a trend has emerged that has H questioning his masculinity. More than once at cafes, the waitperson has given H’s order to K. Apparently only women drink chai lattes! At Ravensthorpe in WA, K ordered a sausage roll with salad, while H ordered a pumpkin and fetta frittata. You can guess what happened. Such reverse sexism.

Outback SA and WA

After staying with our friends in Adelaide and Owen, we ventured back into caravan park and national park world. On our way to Port Augusta, we explored Alligator Gorge in Mt Remarkable NP. Well worth a visit.

While listening to Bush Telegraph on Radio National (a most informative radio program), we heard about an innovative company that is establishing a greenhouse for growing tomatoes in Port Augusta. How so? Check out the details at http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/australia.html. No doubt there will be more of this type of food production in the future for obvious reasons.

We have been listening a lot to the radio, not only because we love ABC Radio (that’s right, isn’t it Kyles?), but also because the car CD player is broken with a CD stuck in it. We do sometimes listen to that CD, which happens to be Australian Crawl’s Greatest Hits. So, when there is poor radio reception (frequently the case along the Nullarbor), H asks K nicely if he can yet again try to decipher James Reyne’s lyrics. The situation is more ‘Oh No Not You Again’ and ‘Things Don’t Seem To Be Going Right’ than ‘Beautiful People’. Ironically, when we finally got radio reception somewhere along the Nullarbor, the local commercial station was playing an Oz Crawl song (no joke).

The SA coastline (Eyre Peninsula and the Nullarbor) is where the mallee meets the sea. It is quite bizarre to see for a boy from Hillston, where there are plenty of mallee trees but the sea is 600km away. And the Nullarbor seems just a bigger version of western NSW, with mallee, saltbush and bluebush dominating. As such the Nullarbor was not so daunting, and it was good to see a significant amount of groundcover. Mallee trees are very resilient, and useful for sequestering carbon, eucalyptus oil, bio energy, etc. Truly a tree for our times. That said, it was great to see the beautiful salmon gums as we neared Norseman in WA.

Without the A’van we flew across the Nullarbor in 2 days, overnighting at Madura Caravan Park. We pitched our tent amongst the mallee trees, and drifted off to sleep with the sound of a diesel generator (for the desalination plant) and road trains and the smell of a septic system.

While at Bremer Bay Caravan Park we were reminded not to judge a book by its cover. We rocked up to our tent site, which was next to an older couple in a Wicked Van. As per normal for these vans, expletives were plastered right across it. Being tragically middle class, we thought we might struggle to connect with them, beyond the obligatory ‘hello’. We found out later from the couple that they needed the cheapest campervan available to get back to Adelaide, after the husband wrote off his motorbike near Ravensthorpe. They were members of the Ulysses Club, which had held a gathering and AGM in Albany. We had quite a good chat in the camp kitchen, covering a range of issues from police revenue raising (unfairly targeting law-abiding Ulysses Club members) to calicivirus.

We are currently staying with friends in the Perth suburb of Padbury. The highlight of the weekend just gone was a visit to Fremantle and Cottesloe Beach, and the lowlight for H was attending a most boring rugby union match between the Western Force and the NSW Waratahs. The winner on the night was the AFL, the NRL, and the A-League, as well as NZ and SA rugby. H’s mate Jono Brake (a Brumbies fan) would say that’s what you get when you watch the Waratahs play.