SOME bizarro tea I bought on Day 147 had me up and groaning for mercy all night, so it’s pretty impressive that I get dressed at 5.30am and head into Melb to have breakfast at Vic Markets. I reckon.
While I’m there I buy a passion fruit plant as a thoughtful gesture, to leave anonymously on a friend’s desk and mess with her head.
In a good way.
Keeper? Yes. Grouse sunrise on the train down, as well.
THIS is what I learned in the kitchen of this old goldfields bank in Kyneton – a town to which people in their middling years retire to play lawn bowls and potter:
* If you wrap a hot, carefully wrung-out napkin around sandwiches and then put them in a cool room, they won’t go stale.
* You can sponge stains out of silk with water you’ve boiled potatoes in.
* If you run hot water over plates you want to put in the oven, they’re less likely to crack.
Keeper? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
MY country town is hosting Wake In Fright night, promising games of two-up (a lie, or today’s header would have been more concise), a barbecue and as much West End Draught as you can drink.
Wake In Fright encapsulates city folks’ fear of country towns; a fear I’ve tended like a bonsai tree. Released in 1971 and filmed in Broken Hill, it follows a schoolteacher (looking unnervingly like Bindi Irwin) who drunkenly gambles away his train fare to civilisation and becomes trapped in his own nightmarish benders and prejudices. It’s famed for its drinking scenes (drink of choice is West End, back in the day when ring-pulls sliced your fingers but gave a satisfying splurt of beer as they did so) and the lengthy roo shooting footage.
When I moved to the bush in a surge of head-for-the-hills adrenalin, the local paper was rife with stories of shadowy men driving around spotlighting roos and leaving their carcasses in plastic bags at the side of the road. Why? the paper rumbled, in between columns on jam-making and fetes. Fucked if I know.
Those first few months on the land were fraught with such paranoia. The local cab drivers seemed suspiciously chatty (when not lapsing into long silences); there were plenty of reed-choked creeks to casually lob bodies into; gunshots went off near my house; mysterious skid marks criss-crossed every road; and endless white utes drove slowly past. And they shoot rabbits, don’t they? I expected to round the corner to my house every evening and find a wicker man built in my honour.
The trees by my house sneak closer whenever you turn your back.
Mine is kind of like a starter town for treechangers, though. I mean, it’s got two IGAs and a train line and it’s featured on Getaway. It even has Target Country, which sells slightly less fashionable garments than Target. This place has got too much of some stuff – French glassware, candles, quilts, lattes, picture frames – and none of others, as if it caters only to the poncing visitors it’s simultaneously trying to terrify. But is it really sinister? I don’t know. I haven’t even seen a snake yet.
And where else but the bush would someone come and anonymously mow your grass while you’re out; flowers and all? Nothing sinister about that.
Keeper? I can’t pack up and leave yet – next week they’re showing Razorback, about a giant feral boar that terrorises city blow-ins. And there’s a guest Q&A with the local bloke who operated the snout.
IT took me a while to dig up the best hijnks to be found in my goldmining town, but it seems these places have been full of idiocy for centuries. Hyuck hyuck!
The ‘Changing Face of Victoria’ exhibition at the State Library has on display an 1855 diary of an unknown miner, written in tight script and fair humour. He’s a likeable chap. He drinks ginger beers to ease his hangovers, heralds the arrival of new prostitutes, ponders the escape of a Bengal Tiger from the travelling circus (which ran off down the main street of Ballarat), and marvels at the theatrical delights of showgirl Lola Montez. Lola carried a bullwhip, drove men to death by alcoholism and duels, and devised the Tarantula Dance, in which she’d frantically paw at her body and tear off her clothes, as if to locate an errant arachnid.
It wasn’t all fun and japes, though. Our man also details the murder of the local butcher and a pub fire that killed 11 people, including six of the newly shipped prostitutes, which must have been very disappointing.
Maybe historians will find a cache of this blog, long after I’ve deleted it in a fit of regret, and will study the descriptions of cow hugging, train gangers with hard luck tales, and execution of perfect donuts, hypothesising as to whether this was the norm in the region, circa 2011.
A mean newspaper depiction of Lola.
Keeper? It’s a hefty historical exhibition so I’ll have another peruse. I like coming out of these places and imagining everyone I pass on the street is from olden times. Put a bonnet on them and hey presto.
Have seen NONE of these in the backyard.
TODAY I was supposed to be picking maggots out of sheeps’ bums, but devastatingly, the weather is too hot for it to go ahead. Instead I go along to the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum.
Castlemaine’s not just famous for bacon, XXXX beer, treechangers and roo bothering. Robert O’Hara Burke was once a police inspector in the town, and an exhibition in the museum marks 150 years since the bungled Burke and Wills expedition that led to his death.
I am powerless to resist having a sniff of an 1860s police uniform that’s on display, but there are no interesting smells to report. The summer uniform is particularly jazzy: navy jacket, no shirt, white neckerchief and trousers. Better suited for a punt around Henley, really.
I also find a photo of the Garfield Water Wheel, the remains of which I nearly drove into when on a driving lesson jaunt.
Keeper? Yes.
HEDY Lamarr’s The Conspirators (“they shared a love too exciting to last”) is showing at the Esquire Theatre on Bourke Street, but there are no clues in this crime scene photo as to what else is going down.
The exhibition at North Melbourne’s Victorian Archives Centre of photos for police and juries, dating between the 1920s and 1930s, is presented with no explanations, and often, no visible corpses. It’s up to the beholder to note the direction of the detectives’ eyes and try to fathom a mystery with few clues.
The Eastern Arcade, for instance, was one of the last locations at which 12-year-old murder victim Alma Tirtschke was spotted in 1921, while an unrecognisable Flinders Street might equally be party to a crime of passion or a gangland shooting. In a close-up of a rumpled bedroom, a dressing-gown hangs on the door; photos are framed messily on a stand; booze clutters the dresser; and each bullet hole on the wall is marked with a red ‘x’.
Keeper? Done this one.
A graveyard of shitboxes. And the Coach & Horses. And that's Clarkfield, really.
ON THE way home today, I make a pit stop at Clarkfield’s Coach & Horses, an 1857 bluestone pub said to be spooked by myriad ghosts. The only things haunting the public bar today, though, are a couple of old geezers watching Australia’s Funniest Home Videos, under the watchful eye of a musty moose head.
A strange thing happens when I get home and I go to put the kettle on… and it’s already hot. My comrade arms himself with a kitchen knife and does the rounds, but nothing leaps out at us. I get a flashback to the psychic from Day 8 telling me about an 80-year-old lady still squatting the house. I guess that puts paid to any future “me time”.
Keeper? An exorcism might be in order. That’s not a euphemism.
There was no way this photo wasn't going to happen.
A TRIKE is not the most inconspicuous of rides. Mine, from Tours on Trike arrives shining like a pre-pud sixpence and draped in tinsel. Perched atop the back seat, I feel like Santa on his sleigh. I must look like him, too, as everyone’s grinning at me. I thought Melburnians were too cool to register surprising sights?
The Chopper 4 is a car/bike hybrid. Powered by a rear-mounted Volkswagon engine, it has a car’s gearbox and brakes, with a motorcycle’s throttle. My tour guide, Alex, is leathered up like a biker (he gets about on a Suzuki in his spare time), and needs a bike licence to drive the machine – yet, he explains, he also needs a car licence to carry passengers.
These ‘threedom machines’ were designed and built by OZ Trikes out near Gosford, NSW, crafting up to 80 a year. The man behind them is Johann Kastner, a German expat who became a paraplegic after a biking accident and wanted to get back on the road, safely.
The trike’s low centre of gravity and 19″ rear tyres make it impossible to tip over, even if you did follow the speedo all the way up to 220 (“that’s a bit optimistic,” Alex admits with a chuckle). So, while being perched up high you feel as though you might take flight at the slightest sight of a loose stone, particularly when hooning over Bolte Bridge, you can try and ‘help’ the driver steer as much as you like with no effect.
While there are a choice of tour routes, a customer can also request their own, with prices starting at $99 per person for an hour. Like all the best guides, Alex imparts his favourite oddities behind the sights as well as the approved historical accounts, communicating through a headset. We take in Flagstaff Gardens (once the highest point in Melbourne, the site of Victoria’s first playground, and home to Melbourne’s oldest corpses), Vic Markets (9000 bodies still lie in the former cemetery after only 1000 were disinterred), contemplate the design faults of the Etihad Stadium and the design curiosities of the Goods Shed and Mission to Seafarers building, and admire the Royal Exhibition Building, erected to host the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880-1881, which is why a lot of other buildings popped up in these years.
Ned Kelly’s armour is housed on the fourth floor of the State Library, I’m told, while Prohibition-style gangster Squizzy Taylor (he had a squizzy eyelid and walked with a squiz), got up to no good at Trades Hall. He also used to drink in St Kilda’s Village Bell, which comes as no great surprise.
The Squiz.
Keeper? Wouldn’t mind trying out the Grand Prix route.
I’VE often thought that death will be swift and rude, like a 110km/h roo bar of retribution. This is on account of me not being observant.
Ma used to say I live in a dream world (NB if actual Dreamworld would like me to live in it for a day, I’m game), and not much has changed. Occasionally, when meandering into the road* I’m jolted by a vision of myself plastered to the front of a bootscooter’s ute as it thunders down the highway. I’ve got an expression of outrage and a slightly askew skirt.
It’s clear that becoming more observant will have to be a matter of training – not only to ensure long life, but to make the most of it. I start things off by totally observing a bunch of things I’ve never observed before on the way to work. Here:
Who knew these things were on the top of engines?
This reminded me of some of the embassies around Park Lane in London.
My boots look good.
This was in the air near Etihad Stadium. Forgot to observe why. However, according to the internet, the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.
Another reason I love my town.
Have observed this would be a perfect tree to climb when not wearing a tight skirt.
* This is why I should get my licence – walking’s far too dangerous.
Keeper? I did step blindly into the road a few times to take the pics, but this will improve with time.
AS a kid I’d spend long car journeys and bedtimes – and then dreams themselves – plotting escape routes. Starting at the family home, or school, I’d map out the windows to jump from (this came in handy later in my teenage years), the neighbouring walls to climb and hedges to hide under, until reaching somewhere I wouldn’t be discovered, for a while at least.
It’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination to bestow Westport Reserve in a little-loved stretch of Port Phillip Bay as my own private Idah-oh, but appealingly, it’s just me and the lapping of the rubbish against the shore. I will plant a flag and rename it.
Keeper: Might keep looking. The ideal hidey-hole would have a cave and secret tunnel.
Undoubtedly the first human foot to set down upon this rock. Sneakers are from New York, btw.
I really like this bush; I'll name it soon.
Civilisation blights the horizon.
Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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