2 Texans Down Under

Imagine that you’ve been transported a century or more back in time and that you are riding a horse or walking or you’re leading a camel across rocky and arid plains in the Australian outback.

Summer or winter, you’d probably be thirsty or at least worried about how to replenish your water supplies in time to save your own life and that of your horse or camel.

Now imagine that you peer over the edge of a wide crack in the red ground and look down onto the tops of healthy trees growing alongside a small stream that ends in a pool of clear fresh water.

As you celebrated, you might well think you’d stumbled upon a Garden of Eden, and that is the name modern-day folks have given to a small, lush canyon which is part of the Watarrka National Park or Kings Canyon between Uluru and Alice Springs in the Northern Territories.

Even for day hikers like me and Kristi, with plenty of water and a Toyota waiting for us in the car park, the Garden of Eden was a refreshing and invigorating sight after a couple of hours of walking up, down, and over dry red rock and scrubby plains.

It isn’t the most spectacular sight or the deepest part of the complex of canyons that constitute Kings Canyon by any means, but it fascinates the eye and the mind because it is so oddly out of place.

Gum trees, cycads, and ferns grow along the bottom of this narrow canyon which is said to harbor a remnant of a tropical rain forest which once was spread out over this now-dry land.

The park service has provided sturdy stairways into and out of the Garden of Eden, so it is easy for hikers to get down to the calm coolness of the pool.

Getting down from the top would not have been so easy for the Aboriginals who must have gathered here or for any European explorers who chanced upon its beauty. In the summertime especially, it must have been hard to contemplate climbing  out to continue one’s trip across the dry, hot plains.

We stayed at the bottom of the Garden of Eden, however, only a half hour or so.  We were drawn on by the chance to see the 270-meter  (886 foot) sheer cliff face visible from the trail farther along the main canyon’s rim.  And our car.  And our hotel room.  And food.

Our four-hour hike around Kings Canyon would have been well worth our effort on the cool winter day of our visit without the Garden of Eden, but it was a welcome bit of green in the pervasive red.

Just thinking about it, now, makes me feel good.  Visit it if you can.

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 »

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 »

Thinking of taking a big leap? Thinking of starting a new chapter in your life and considering Australia as its setting? Then you may be in luck.

The new Rudd Government has announced for the coming fiscal year the biggest annual increase in permanent and temporary migration into Australia since the 1940s, and there doesn’t seem to be much backlash. Some worries, but no real opposition.

The plan is to open the door to nearly 300,000 workers from overseas between July 1 this year and the end of June, 2009, and the work visas will be not only for high-demand jobs, but various kinds of work, skilled and unskilled.

As I noted in my last blog, Treasurer Wayne Swan, speaking for the Labor Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced this widening of the immigration door in his budget presentation last week and it could be good news for anyone considering moving to the Land of Oz.

(Note: My spell checker IS working. Aussies put a “u” in “labor,” writing it “labour,” but not in the name of the party now in power, Labor.)

Inflation is a hot topic here and business leaders hope opening the door to more migrants will help dampen wage demands. Labour union leaders fear that it might, but they don’t seem to be too worried, only protesting that they need a place at the immigration decision-making table.

The reasons behind this substantial change and the absence of acrimony about it, so far, were expressed in a column May 17 in The Australian by the newspaper’s primary political-affairs editor, Paul Kelly.

Kelly wrote: “Australian labour shortages are here to stay. They are Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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 »