2 Texans Down Under

Earth Hour is being judged as a great success here for saving a bit of energy and showing worldwide concern for environmental issues, in part because the idea began only a year ago in Sydney when 54 per cent of Sydney folks are said to have switched off their lights.

Last night, Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore launched her city’s participation by noting that this “inspired idea” has become a world movement whose “immediate success and … swift adoption around the world shows that people are not only alert to the threat of global warming but they’re engaged and they’re ready and willing to act.”

Here in Brisbane, according to the “Courier Mail,” more than 6000 individuals and 800 businesses signed up in advance to turn off lights from 7 to 8 p.m. last night (Brisbane does not observe daylight savings time) and many thousands more folks here took part.

Along with 190 buildings and more than 100 neon signs registered to switch off, reporter Daryl Passmore said, key Brisbane landmarks that went dark for an hour included the Gateway, Story, Victoria and William Jolly bridges, Conrad International Treasury Casino, City Hall, Castlemaine Fourex Brewery in Milton, Waterfront Place and the Suncorp building’s highly visible downtown clock.

We didn’t see any of that, of course, because Read the rest of this entry »

Getting out of Brisbane on the Friday before Easter was easy since we’re not far from the highway to Ipswich, the first major town on the route Kristi had planned for us.

Soon we were in farming country with rolling hills and trees and grass and clean air. After Ipswich: Warwick. Then, Stanthorpe, a central town in the Granite Belt. On the road again.

Maybe road-trips such as the one we were beginning won’t be possible for much longer, or as common, anyway. We’d been warned that we were heading for popular vacation destinations and that we should expect crowds of people on the national park tours and on wine tours.

Only on one of our several hikes did we see many people. Often we were alone and we could walk for an hour or more without seeing other hikers. Some local folk we talked to complained of slow business and too-few visitors.

No complaints from us. Except that the visitor’s center in Stanthorpe was closed for Good Friday (and lots of businesses were closed right through Monday). The public toilets were open and available, though, and we found a nice, shaded and smooth rock beside a beautiful pond for a picnic lunch.

Then we headed out for the mother of all granite domes, Bald Rock, the largest protrusion of volcanic stone in the southern hemisphere. Years ago, we’d hiked up Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg, Texas, a “batholith” that rises 450 feet (137 meters) above the woods in the Hill Country, and we thought of that as we stood at the bottom looking up at the smooth slope and two wee figures we could just make out at the top.

Twenty minutes later, we met these two coming down as we moved up. All four of us were proceeding slowly and carefully, because Bald Rock is 200 meters (650 feet) high, measured from the forest-level starting point, and if a person slipped and started rolling down the hard granite, there’d be nothing to stop him until he reached the trees.

Fortunately, the granite is pitted like orange peel, and good hiking boots let you feel fairly secure about your footing if you go slowly and pay attention to balance. We decided we wouldn’t want to be climbing Bald Rock in a rain, though, and we were glad to know about a more gentle, longer path down.

From the top there are great views of trees, hills, Mount Norman, Mount McKenzie, and other granite outcroppings such as The Pyramids and Castle Rock.

Bald Rock itself, however, is the main attraction, with its vertical striping caused by mineral deposits, and the presence of egg-shaped boulders of marble, each one or two stories tall, strewn casually around, seemingly ready to start tumbling downward at any moment. Given that they’ve been there many hundreds of years, we took a chance and sat down on the slope below one to rest in its shade.

How much of our appreciation of Bald Rock came from the effort and risk required to reach its top? We’re not sure, but, coming from a law-suit prone country, we found it a bit amazing that the Aussie park service posted no signs stating the obvious (if you slip and fall, you could die) in language written by attorneys for the protection of the government.

And there were no handrails to mar the bald beauty of the Rock. No handrails. No legal jargon. Could be worse.

We climbed Bald Rock without mishap and then had a pleasant meander down. We liked it all. We recommend Bald Rock National Park for your list of places to visit when you come to Queensland.

Being salary-dependent and knowing that we might be able to live in Australia only another year or two, Kristi and I take every opportunity to experience its various parts. And varied this country is, in its plant life, its critters, and its geography.

Like most people here, we had four days off for Easter weekend and we took advantage of every waking moment, leaving our driveway at 7:15 a.m. Friday and returning at 8 p.m. Monday.

Our plan was to visit national parks in the Granite Belt about three hours southwest of Brisbane in the vicinity of Stanthorpe, but by the time we got home, we’d also hiked in parts of Washpool National Park and the Main Range National Park.

And get this: we visited New England and drove from one side of Texas to the other. That’s what we’ll be writing about to friends and family, and it’s true.

We were on the New England Highway from Warwick, QLD, to Glen Innes in New South Wales, and, being as close as 60 or 70 miles from a town we’d heard so much about, we couldn’t resist adding in a trip to Texas, Queensland, population 900.

It was one quiet place on Easter Monday, but now we can say we’ve been there!

Not only that, but, thanks to an amateur Japanese astronomer named Aiji, we’ve finally been introduced to Read the rest of this entry »

Money. Since beginning consideration of your compatibility with Australia, I’ve discussed two of the three traditional areas of concern: degree of neatness and sex. I took the easy one’s first.

Money is the tough one. First, flying to an Aussie destination from the US will cost you couple of thousand at least, maybe much more, for a round-trip ticket, and then you’ll need food (expensive) and lodging (very expensive).

It helps a little, of course, that your US dollar will still get you an Australian dollar and nine cents more, and maybe you are one of the fortunate few who don’t have to worry about such things. A “New York Times” story this past week said there are in the world today 2,000 superyachts (120 to more than 500 feet long, valued in millions) and about 200,000 people could afford to buy one of them.

Are you more interested in the minimum wage than the price of yachts? You could be in luck here. Is the minimum wage still about $5.50 per hour in Texas and up to around $10 in one or more states of the US? I know middle- and low-income earners in the US have been losing ground.

It doesn’t seem so here. Aussies prefer to speak in terms of minimum wage per week and a week is counted as 38 hours of work. The current, Australia-wide minimum wage is $522.12 or $13.74/hour (US$12.60).

The Australian Fair Pay Commission (AFPC) wants to give the lowest-paid workers here a $26/week raise to $548.12/week or $14.42/hour (US$13.23). Unions want more. The Rudd government is expected to decide soon.

No worries, though, if you’re between 18 and 45 years of age, and your training or experience qualifies you for a 457, skilled migrant worker, visa. That lets you stay four years, at least, and according to this morning’s newspapers, you won’t be worrying about the minimum wage.

“The Australian” has a front-page story today by Paul Maley and Matthew Franklin saying Australia’s full-employment economy is currently paying skilled migrants $15,000 more per year than the average Australian earns.

Here are a few facts from that story:

1. In 2006-07, the average skilled migrant’s salary was $71,600 (US$65,682) while the average salary Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I talked about three important considerations for predicting compatibility in relationships — sex, money, and degree of neatness — and speculated that these concerns could be important to the question of how compatible Australia and you might be. Could you move here and sustain a relationship with this continent?

I dealt with degrees of neatness first. Now you might want to be sure no one’s looking over your shoulder because I want us to consider s-e-x in the US and in AU.

SEX — I have no idea what single life here is like. (How embarrassing, to have to begin with a confession of ignorance, but then, knowledge isn’t a requirement of blogging, is it?)

I get the impression, though, that sexual mores are pretty relaxed here. Live together for a while and you’ll be seen, legally, as being in a “de facto relationship.” You may even be identified, a bit inelegantly, as “a de facto.”

On the positive side, some states allow same-sex and opposite-sex de facto couples to register with the state in order to get a certificate as verification of their commitment to each other.

More than US women, Australian women seem to have an easy-going attitude about the exposure of skin.

My wife has noticed, for example, that cleavage is much more common here Read the rest of this entry »

I read somewhere that people considering marriage or living together should ask themselves, first, whether they are compatible in three aspects of life: money, sex, and degree of neatness.

The idea was that if your would-be partner (the all-encompassing Australian term for what I would have referred to, once upon a time, as “boy friend” or “girl friend” or “fiancé”) was much different from you in attitudes toward the acquisition of and spending of money, in sexual preferences and ethics, or in her/his place on the slob-to-neat-freak continuum, chances for long-term love were poor.

That’s exactly the sort of wise counsel that people falling in love have no interest in hearing, of course. Most will be making the classic errors I saw illustrated once in a cartoon that showed a man and woman passionately kissing. Above his head there was a thought balloon saying, “She’ll always be this way.” Above her head? A thought balloon saying, “I can change him.”

But what if you’re falling for a country? What if you’re thinking you might love living, for example, in Australia? Could you and the Land of Oz have a good thing going? Should you make the big leap, abandon your present neighborhood, and flee to a new neighbourhood in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, or some other down under place? Could you and this continent be compatible?

Obviously, I know nothing about your attitudes toward money, sex, or neatness, but I am in a position now to tell you a bit about Australia’s tendencies in those areas. You be the judge of whether or not this sounds like a partner for you.

DEGREE OF NEATNESS — Per capita, Australia pollutes more than any other country, because of coal (mining and burning), industrial plants, and too many cars on the roads too often for too long. It’s a suburban culture along the coasts and the growing traffic jams are not neat.

On the other hand, the population is less than a tenth that of the US, so congestion away from the city centers tends to be not too bad. In the capital cities, mass transit is better than in most US cities other than, perhaps in Boston and New York. We’ve never lived anywhere that is so Read the rest of this entry »

Brisbane’s location, between the Gold Coast’s beaches and nearby national parks an hour or two south and the Sunshine Coast and nearby national parks an hour or two north, is great for weekend trips.

Australia Day at the end of January provided a long weekend and Kristi and I took advantage of it by heading north to visit Mapleton, Montville, Maleny, Mooloolaba, Caloundra, Buderim, Tewantin and various beaches and mountaintops in between.

No worries if you don’t know where any of these places are. With one or two exceptions, they were unknown to us, too, before we used the holiday weekend to celebrate our birthdays (if you ignore the year designations, Kristi is about a week older than I am).

Two very different kinds of natural beauty were on display before our eyes (a) the ocean and its beaches and (b) the lush countryside a very few miles inland along the Blackall Range of small mountains.

From a two-lane highway that runs mostly along the ridge of these mountains, we enjoyed grand views of the green meadows and forests of an area some have described as “the calm behind the Sunshine Coast.” Not far away in the east, we often saw, was the ocean.

We found interesting forest trails in Mapleton Forest Reserve and in Kondalilla National Park. We briefly visited tourist shops in Montville and then drove to Maleny, where everyone Read the rest of this entry »