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.

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 »

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 »

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 »

“Less tar, more taste,” proclaimed a United States cigarette company
ad a few years ago. Today, the US and Australia could claim this:
“Less smoking, more pollution.”

Americans send huge amounts of toxic stuff into the air and water and
Australians pollute more per person than any other nation, but while
we foul the atmosphere, we are breathing easier at ground level than
we otherwise would because of steady declines in tobacco smoking.

Phillip Adams, a prominent print and radio commentator here, recently
wrote about parallels between the indefensible tactics of tobacco
companies peddling their products over the decades and the way our
political leaders in both countries avoid taking effective action to
stop “giving the planet lung cancer.”

Propaganda and profit, he argues, are keeping us from cleaning up our
environmental act in the same way lies and deceptions allowed
companies to manufacture and sell billions of highly addictive
products that maim and kill.

These little white sticks that Adams labels weapons of mass
destruction (March 22-23, 2008, The Weekend Australian) are still
being manufactured and sold, of course, often addicting the poorest
and most vulnerable before they reach the legal age of consent. Adams
could have written about corporate child abuse, too.

Tobacco use is still the leading cause of preventable death in the US,
according to the Center for Disease Control, but the proportion of
adults smoking there is as low as it’s been since the 1930s. About
21% of adult Americans smoke.

A government report says 70% of Aussie men and 30% of Aussie women
smoked in the 1950s. About 17% of adult Australians smoke now.

In both countries, prohibitions against smoking in enclosed public
places Read the rest of this entry »

Americans want to do nation-building, says Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times after five months of traveling the country while writing his next book, but “they want to do nation-building in America.”

Why? In a May 4 op-ed piece entitled “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman says ordinary citizens in the US are becoming aware that the country desperately needs to be rebuilt.

He believes people are realizing that the US is not as strong as it used to be, that city-states like Dubai and Singapore are providing money to shore up American banks, that the war in Iraq has the military pinned down, and that President Bush has been reduced to begging Saudi Arabia for petroleum cost relief.

The post-WW II belief in America as the place where everyone wanted to be is, now, harder to maintain.

Friedman cites two transportation hubs as examples of the impoverishment of American infrastructure relative to that of other nations. One is Berlin’s “luxurious central train station” in comparison to the “grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City.”

Well, of course, Europe beats us on trains, many Americans would say. We know that.

But the second comparison pits a John F. Kennedy Airport terminal against one in Singapore’s Changi Airport. At JFK, Friedman says, he and his wife recently had difficulty finding a place to sit. In Singapore’s airport they found spaciousness, free internet portals, and children’s play zones.

And he doesn’t even mention some of the things that make Singapore’s airport a preferred stop-over point for me and my partner. In one terminal there are luxurious foot-massage machines. These are stress-reducing and they’re free. Not far away there Read the rest of this entry »

Moving to Australia gave us a new perspective on our home country, the United States. Now Kristi and I are traveling for a bit in the Netherlands and Belgium following a work conference she had in Amsterdam and we’re getting a new perspective on Australia.

 * Most noticeable of all is the fact that Australia is, relatively speaking, less pricey than we thought. We asked our friend from Amsterdam if anything is cheaper there than in Australia, where she now lives, and here answer was unequivocal: no.

 Our experience verifies that with one exception: beer, very good beer of many varieties, costs less than a euro per bottle in stores and you surely can’t beat that in Brisbane.

 * One cannot live on beer alone.  But you can come pretty close if you add in cheese.  The Netherlands has incredible cheeses.

 * The Internet speeds I experience with my ADSL connection at home are put to shame by all the connections speeds we’ve experienced here. Gmail comes up fast! I watched a brief movie sent to me via email and there were no interruptions for more downloading. None. Amazing.

 * Really old things in Australia tend to be trees, like Read the rest of this entry »

People everywhere, even those of us who enjoy travel and find ourselves able to adjust well to living in countries other than the one in which we were born, long for “the comforts of home.”

Being near family and friends is at the top of the list of what we miss.  Knowing one’s way around and speaking the most-common language, is up there, too.

But sometimes what we expatriates miss is  “comfort food” or, at least, food we’re accustomed to buying and eating.

Friends of ours from Amsterdam were missing “pindakaas” until they found a Dutch food store not far from where they live now in Brisbane.  That Dutch word means “peanut cheese,” which is Read the rest of this entry »