2 Texans Down Under

We came into contact with fewer people on the hiking trails of “the red center” of Australia last week than we expected to meet and yet we had more conversations than we expected to have.

Even though we were walking the National Park trails during the last week before the start of “high season,” we thought the more popular locations would be far busier than they were.  Sometimes we hiked for as much as two hours without seeing anyone else.  Only on the shorter and most accessible trails did we see more than a half dozen or so other hikers.

A high percentage of those we did see, though, were friendly and engaging.

For example, as Kristi said in our “Brisbane Chronicles” email newsletter that we send to family and friends, we got into an extended conversation one day with a man and wife, probably in their 60s, who were travelling in a 4-wheel drive vehicle and camping out for a month or more.

Soon they were telling us about having just been stranded at a campsite in the wetter part of the Northern Territories.  A rain flooded the countryside around where they were camping.  They couldn’t drive out and nobody else could drive in.  They had obeyed the rules of the off-road road, though, and packed a two week supply of food, so they just enjoyed the peace and quiet of being totally marooned for six days.  No worries.

Two couples hiking together in the Olgas taught us to find true north using our wrist watches.  We also discussed with them birds, binoculars, and ways in which climate change is affecting Melbourne.

Three young women traveling together, wild-animal biologists all, filled us in on the difficulties of Read the rest of this entry »

Uluru or Ayers Rock is impressive, especially in the changing light of sunrise or sunset when it glows with an ever deeper red than is normal in Australia’s “red center” region, but it is not, as we thought it was and as web sites often claim, the largest monolith in the world, or even in Australia.

Kristi and I took the six-mile walk around the base of this rock that reaches up 348 meters or 1,142 feet.   Aboriginals consider Uluru holy and ask tourists not to climb it, although the park service provides at one point a row of posts and a chain to hold onto for those who do go to the top.

Winds were too high to allow for climbing the day we were there, but even if they hadn’t been, we found it scary enough to simply look at the line of chain-holding posts receding into the upward distance.

That sight should have been enough to deter any rational person, I thought, even if one didn’t notice the metal plaques commemorating those of earlier years who inadvertently ended their climbs by taking the quickest possible way of returning to ground level.

We had flown into Ayers Rock Airport and had a good view of Uluru from the air.  Renting a car there (here, it’s “hiring a car”), we also drove to a nearby collection of other red rocks known as Kata Tjuta or “the Olgas,” to King’s Canyon, and then to Alice Springs, from which we took a plane back home seven days after beginning of this visit, our first, to the out back.

Although Uluru was, for me, the most touristified and least interesting of the places we saw, if I were an Aboriginal I might revere it, as the indigenous people have for generations.  There are locations around its base identified as places of women-only secrets and others of men-only secrets.  There are fenced-off places where you are asked to take no pictures.

Most large rock outcroppings in this desert region, and there are many in the “red center,” have drawn people over the centuries because they collected any rain that fell and channeled Read the rest of this entry »

I got a bird’s eye view of about a thousand miles of Australian desert, mountains, sandy rivers, and “gibber plains” this week and it was about as much fun as a person can have in a commercial airliner seat.

A courteous Qantas check-in agent at the Alice Springs Airport assigned me and Kristi to window and aisle seats toward the front of the plane to Brisbane when I told him I wanted to see the countryside.  I’m grateful that he did.

The sky was clear and for an hour and a half I sat transfixed by the scenery passing below at, I suppose, 600 miles an hour or more.  My camera has an “aerial photo” setting and a zoom lens with an anti-shake mechanism, so I shot picture after picture of territory I’d never seen before and may never fly over again.

We’d just spent a week hiking around in “the red center” of Australia, starting in Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), driving to King’s Canyon, and then using Alice Springs as a base for tours to its west and east.

From our home-bound plane on Wednesday afternoon, I got to see country similar to and different from what we’d hiked and I was made sharply aware of the luxuries of modern-day life by Alice on the Line, a book about one family’s experience of travel to, and life in, Alice Springs a century ago.

With the help of a professional writer, Douglas Lockwood, Doris Bradshaw Blackwell told of traveling in 1899 from Adelaide with her mother and siblings to join her father, the newly appointed manager of the telegraph station in Alice Springs.  She was eight years old and 300 miles of the trip involved riding for 14 days in either a buggy or a wagon, neither of which offered any protection from sun or storms.  It’s quite a story.

We got to visit Telegraph Station Museum, including the house the Bradshaws lived in until Doris was 16.  Built of stone and located two miles from what was then a tiny village known as “the Alice,” it is today much as it appears in black-and-white photos from the early 1900s.

As the landscape slipped past, below my comfortable airline seat, I noticed long red streaks that puzzled me at first.  They were part of the scenery for about an hour.

I realized what I was seeing when I recalled Doris Blackwell’s tale of Read the rest of this entry »

Where’s the best place to live? The answers vary, but every year Australian news sources pay attention to survey results and generally report that Sydney and Melbourne get high ratings among the world’s cities.

This year, Sydney was named “world’s best city” by a group called Anhold City Brands Index, just topping London, Paris, Rome, New York, and, in sixth place, Melbourne.

While researching my book on Australia last year, I found a report from a British firm called the Economic Intelligence Unit that put Melbourne at the top of its list of “most livable cities,” behind only Vancouver and Vienna.

That group put Perth, Adelaide, and Sydney in the top 10 and Brisbane at 11th.

This year’s report from a company that advises on pay levels for expatriates puts Australian cities high in its list of 215 cities, but not at the top.

Mercer’s Worldwide Quality of Living Survey for 2008 has Sydney at 9th, Melbourne Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, we have a clear notion of “the Darling downs.”

Most Brisbane folk watch the ABC television weather news on weekday evening, I expect, for hints on how to dress the next day, but for me it’s a geography lesson as much as anything else.

On an outline of Queensland, town and city names are posted with their high and low temperatures for the day, and I think, “Oh, that’s where that is” or, more rarely, “We’ve been there.”

But the names of various regions such as “the Darling downs” never get put on the screen because, obviously, everybody knows where they are. Unless, of course, you’re newcomers, as we are even after nearly three years.

Until Easter weekend this year, we didn’t know where Australia’s “New England” was. Then we drove through there and expanded our knowledge even further by visiting Texas, QLD, which is, appropriately enough, in the southwestern part of the state. Well, south, anyway, and as far west as we’d been.

On that trip, we also learned, while hiking over large chunks of it, where “the granite belt” is and we got to know a bit about Stanthorpe, where our farmers’ market apples come from, near the New South Wales border.

But “the Darling downs” was an entirely mythical place as far as I was concerned. I assumed it must have something to do with the Darling River, which is dying a slow death from drought, up-stream irrigation, and city-water demands.

Our printed maps don’t use the term as a label and my trusty Australian dictionary carries no definition of it despite listing “Darling shower.” That’s a dust storm.

As I said, though, we are finally in the know. This past weekend, Kristi and I traveled west and then north, passing near Ipswich, driving over the Wivenhoe Dam’s dam, and going through Esk, Toogoolawah, Blackbutt (named after the tree of the same name, I assume), Read the rest of this entry »

On this Environment Day, Queensland got news about water in our dams, the Prime Minister talked about cars and fuel, and everybody seemed to be paying attention to events in the United States.

On the down side, this week’s rains didn’t top up Brisbane’s reservoirs after all. They’re still a half point short of the 40 per cent of capacity needed to trigger a pull back from the current level of water restrictions here, according to an announcement by Premier Anna Bligh.

Only showers are predicted for the weekend.

But on the up side, our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced to Parliament that fuel efficient and hybrid cars will be the main focus of his government’s plan to assist Australia’s faltering automobile industry.

Noting that there’s already a $500 million green car innovation fund set to begin operation in 2010 and run for five years, Rudd looked to a government/industry partnership to address fuel and environmental challenges by producing not only a “green” car, but also “a green car industry.”

The biggest story in Australian news for most news outlets today, however, is an American story: the victory of Barack Obama in the Democratic primary contest. It was the lead story on the 7:30 Report (ABC, public television) last night and Hillary Clinton’s indication of her decision to soon withdraw will probably be the lead story tonight.

The entire front page of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail (tabloid) was devoted to the Obama victory and the national paper, The Australian, gave it thorough coverage, too. Public radio carried a story of jubilation in Africa and in Indonesia along with positive comments from America-watchers in Europe and other parts of Asia.

Geoff Elliott, The Australian’s Washington correspondent, wrote that there is much for Australia to be glad about in the possibility of an Obama presidency, noting that Obama is Read the rest of this entry »

Two liquids, water and gasoline or petrol, are big news here this week, as is the case in many parts of the world.

The good news is that we’ve had rain, glorious alternating bands of light to heavy rain for more than a day, ending this morning, about three inches of unexpected wet stuff here in Brisbane. That’s about twice the normal June total.

News reports say farmers south and west of here, who’ve missed out on earlier rains this year, also got welcome totals.

The three lakes (called “dams” here) that are Brisbane’s main water source — Wivenhoe, Somerset, and North Pine — have all caught some runoff and their total content is approaching 40 per cent, the point at which water-use restrictions here would be eased back a notch.

The largest, with about two-thirds of the storage capacity of the three, is Wivenhoe and it is often shorted by weather systems that soak Brisbane. Located well inland from the coastline, where rain is almost always heaviest here in Australia, it’s increase yesterday was less than two-tenths of one per cent of capacity.

Worse, government bar graphs show a decline from nearly 30,000 megalitres of stored water in the three dams in April, 2005, to just over 10,000 in April, 2008, roughly the time we’ve been living here. (Honest, though, we’re not at fault; the two of us use just a bit more water daily than Brisbane’s Council has set as a usage goal for one person.)

Petrol is another matter, of course. While the gasoline pumps seem to be delivering ample supplies, the cost has soared here as it has in the United States and elsewhere. Unleaded regular was selling this morning at our local 7/11 for about $1.43/litre or roughly 5.15 US dollars per gallon.

I put in premium on the recommendation of a Prius mechanic and paid Read the rest of this entry »