Tasmanian Revel

All around was total stillness ... not a single sound, save for my own tinnitus and a very occasional rustle of the wind in the bushes. I'd not seen another person for a good while, and I started to recall the series of events and decisions that had lead me to this particular situation, so very very different from the hassle, squalor and idiocy of St. Kilda. I'd decided to put my vast reserves of restlessness to good use, desiring to see The Great Outdoors - perchance the "Real Australia". I'd seen a large, red ship with "Spirit Of Tasmania" scored across it, so without thinking about the details too much bought a ticket and took the ride. Across the Bass Strait, where the Roaring Forties buffered the boat this way and that, corkscrewing it's way into the unknown. It got so bad that two previously tough talking blokes ceased their doom mongering, and stories of bearded women driving oil tankers, to start a vomit marathon. Gale force winds, five metre waves ; my beer leapt straight off the table but the crew sat around smiling, so I was untroubled too. At some point I must have slept because when I woke with a start there were dozens of bodies, snoozing on the previously empty floor. In the morning I found my way to Launceston, with no accomodation, transport or any idea what I was going to do. But that was the point - to let go, zoom out, let the details handle themselves. I booked into a fairly nondescript hostel, where the other patrons were thankfully insular.

The Cataract Gorge looked as if it might offer the scale and space I was looking for, so I went for a ramble around the First Basin. Despite the usual collection of other tourists, families and staff, ten minutes walk into the trail turned into a complete removal from any evidence of man. The silence and stillness was unlike anything I'd seen before - no sound or sign of another human being. I pressed on up the dusty track, the sun beating down and my head clear of any thought or worry. My only company was the weight on my back and the crunch and snap of an occasional twig. I couldn't say how long I'd been walking; I had a particular sudden sense that a good amount of time had passed without realising. I looked back to where I had walked, and realised that I had not seen another person the whole time, I suddenly got the feeling there was something else there and that I was being watched. I stood still, very still ... who could tell what sort of wildlife there might be around here ? Everyone knows the most dangerous animal in the forest is a human being ... but that didn't change the huge sense of foreboding. I pressed on more cautiously, aware of my surroundings and on the lookout. Sure enough, there was evidence of life everywhere - innumerable rustlings in the undergrowth, a darting sliver of an unseen creature, my every move startling or alerting something. I felt much more a part of my environment, actually in it as opposed to just crashing around in it. Perhaps this is a diluted form of how the animals feel - not just relying on sight.

Deep in the bowels of the open air cafe I encountered half a dozen or so of these strange creatures, previously unseen by man. They have a most striking plumage, a raucus call, and display not one iota of fear as they snatch dougnuts from slow witted tourists. I have therefore decided to name them "Rudebirds" - though I suspect they are not indiginous to the area.














Hobart, the state capital was to be my next destination, a straight out blaze through the highways and backroads of the midland. Johnny Cash for company, heading south at a hundred and ten per, grin as wide as the Cataract Gorge. I got my first taste of the splendour and variety of the Tasmanian countryside - vast yellow tracts of cornfields, mouth as dry as the scrubland, running my tongue around my teeth to feel the jagged mountains on the horizon. I stopped for a piss at St. Peter's Pass, and got a good laugh when two youths asked if I needed a hand trashing my rental car. They'd just seen Jackass and reckoned we could go and do a load of 'nutties' in the car park, perhaps write the car off, for the low, low price of $6 insurance. It seems that there's no shortage of dickheads, liars and chancers in this part of the world either - but I guess you can't expect everyone you meet to discuss Proust over a game of croquet.

40% of Tasmania is designated as reserves or national parkland, and after the trek about Cataract Gorge, I was keen to see more - this time at Mt. Field National Park (founded in 1916). A more taxing drive presented itself, long winding single lane highways, train tracks that appear from nowhere and disappear again into the forests. There were a disconcerting number of skid marks along the way, snaking their way between both lanes for surprising distances. It's very easy to get distracted whilst driving around here - the scenery dominates everything you see; sea birds swoop and glide alongside, gazing back through the window. Very important to concentrate for other reasons as well - it's possible to drive for hours without seeing anyone else around - particularly in the southwest wilderness area. Empty highway in front and in the sideview mirrors, there's no way you'd be found in the case of a crash or running out of fuel. The only other vehicles you might see are 18 wheelers loaded with timber, or a farmer shiftin' hogs in a trailer. At one point I suddenly realised that I had missed a turning and was in the depth of the Gordon Forest - about sixty clicks off course, and 1500m higher than I intended to be. I drove past decimated hills that had been razed almost clean of trees from logging. This is a heated environmental topic around here, with passionate views on both sides of the argument. I spent a good few hours trekking around Russel Falls and other parts of the alpine park, only seeing a handful of other people in that time. Again during that time I felt as if my senses were heightened, and any noise in the undergrowth made me stop in my tracks to see what was there. If you actually want to see any wildlife, you have to be extremely patient - the wild wallabies are, naturally enough, quite wary of people. Indeed, at one point I chanced on one sitting on a log, and had to walk a way down the path before very slowly making my way back again to let it relax.


This is the chap himself ... the Tasmanian Devil. Quite cuddly looking ... until he opened his gob for a yawn. Cripes, no wonder they're called the vacuum cleaners of the forest. On the drive back I noticed a sign for the Something Wild animal sanctuary - so I made a spur of the moment decision to drop in and see what it was about. I was greeted at the entrance buy a chap with a fully grown koala bear in his arms (and a huge scratch across his forehead).



Koalas are so snobby ! Just look at the expression on his face. They never want to look at the camera, either. I had to coax this one out with a few verses of "Waltzing Koala" - it listened to this for a bit, then had the nerve to hold up a placard with a score of 4 on it. Bloody cheek ! You can go back to stuffing your face with Eucalyptus leaves for all I care.













Baby Roo ! I can't deny it - this is here for the blatant "Aaah" value.











On top of the bottom of the world. The real jewel in my time in Tasmania was a trip up to the Cradle Mountain. I decided on an organized tour this time, as before I'd just rolled up to places on my own initiative. The weather is very, very changeable around here and I am told there are only forty days a year when it is really bright and clear for a significant amount of time. I somehow lucked out, because it was absoloutely perfect weather for the duration of the day. The air here is possibly some of the cleanest in the world, and the scent of some of the plants and herbs that grow up here envelops you. You can't see the expression on my face in this photo ... suffice to say there was an almost sheer drop behind me. You can also tell from the angle this is taken how much I had to walk down again from where Lee (our guide) was standing with the camera.



I also spent a bit of the day underground, in the Marakoopa Caves, which are described as 'active caves' as the limestone stalagtites and stalagmites are still forming. The dark, cold isolated and surrealness of the cave made me think that this was more similar to somewhere like Mars, rather than what was a few hundred metres above us. The strangest sight was the glow worm cavern - thousands of pulsing lime green points, hiding and then re-appearing behind the myriad stalagtite fingers. It was undeniably similar to the constellations of the night sky, yet we were 150m below rainforest.

Tasmania is one of the smallest states of Australia, but it has bewildering differences in geography even over small distances. From the vividness of the midlands, the landscape around the mountains took on a different and strange palette. The colours looked completely unsaturated, pale, cool - but also very defined and rugged. Not just the blues and whites of a mountainscape, but also burnt red earths and bleached, skeletal trees. Or the cool, secluded greens of the Gondwana forest, where moss lies like snow over every root and trunk. The cover of the tree canopy is so dense that despite the bright sun above, it's acts like a huge natural refridgerator. Lee explained that despite the beauty of the area, it was extremely important to have your wits about you, and to plan treks properly - the bush claims it's fair share of people who just wander off and are never seen again. During our drives about, I commented that much of the countryside looked quite English (particularly the village of Deloraine). This apparantly is deliberate, as the colonists who originally came here tried to introduce vegetation and wildlife from the British Isles, probably in an attempt to make it a bit more like home. Obviously this led to a fair bit of environmental damage, and the gorse in particular took a good hold on the land.

I'm told this a 'Paddymella' - a smaller species of kangaroo, much like a wallaby. Look closely at the pouch - it's not being rude, that's one of it's newborns.



















And here's the wombat. Just ambling across the road as it pleased. It can't be seen here, but this one was also carrying a baby wombat in her pouch - only visible from the rear. When attacked, wombats will make a beeline for their holes, and present their arse to the outside world (I can see the appeal of such an action sometimes). I'm told they have a sort of toughened plate, much like the shell of a tortoise, and if a predator such as a dog tries to force it's way into their den, they make a small gap and then crush the skull of their foe against the upper wall. So don't try it !









Ah, the old 'looking thoughtful' trick, eh ? I know what you're about, my lad ... plotting another muffin heist I'm sure. This beaked sod had them away the minute you turned your back - I'll see you in court old son.

After The Goldrush

Melbourne was formed in 1935 by European settlers, mostly heading in from Tasmania in search of better land. By 1951, the population had reached a steady 29,000, and broke away from New South Wales, thus forming the colony of Victoria. The discovery of gold at places such as Ballarat lead to a frenzied scramble to get as much of it out of the ground in as short a time as possible, and an explosion in immigration. This had the effect of easily making Victoria the richest state, and Melbourne the most populous city (at the time). Today it's the largest inland city in Victoria (even though it has a population of 90,000, the centre is best described as 'sparse', and had me scratching my head as to the exact definition of 'City'). We made a weekend trip out to the place in an attempt to find out a bit more about how the state was forged - I've put this as a separate post because I think certain members of my family might be interested in all this.

I had little idea of what Ballarat would be like in advance - aside from it being a little known song by The Lemonheads, and that it meant 'Resting Place' in it's Aboriginal spelling. We booked ourselves into a slightly dog-eared looking hostel which, despite having perfectly nice rooms, induced a distinct feel of unease in me ... maze like corridors, an undefined musty smell, slightly spaced out receptionist and vague signs alluding to different sets of rules for 'visitors' and 'permanent residents' - whatever the hell that means. Dan made some crack about it being haunted, but I never did like the idea of checking into a room which has a huge sign above it saying 'No Exit' ... ever played the old PC game Alone In The Dark ? It was like that. Anyway, we made a token attempt to hit the town, as it was Saturday night after all. Ballarat is no exception to anywhere else that we've been in Austalia in that it takes a lot of pride in the quality of food available - you certainly won't be complaining, provided you can afford it. There was precious little in the way of entertainment, so we took a chance on a fairly rubbish British themed pub. Unexpectedly, I was harrassed up by some rowdy old hens while Dan got the drinks in - apparantly I'm a "cuuuuutie". O technicolour harridan, how blootered ye are. Ballarat's oddballs weren't done for the evening, however ... a peculiar old fellow in the "Irish" pub insisted on chewing our ears off for the best part of an hour. Three topics only were discussed - "You boys are alright", "What time is it ?" and "You look just like Mick Jagger". Until he got so pissed he almost fell of his stool - ahh, how the world loves a drunk. Like the time in Rising Sun when a fight broke out to the strains of "What's New, Pussycat ?", the lesson is clear : avoid themed pubs at all costs.

Thankfully that wasn't the reason we were there, however. The economy of Ballarat these days is mostly about tourism - focused on Sovereign Hill, a sort of cross between Legoland and the set of Deadwood. I was pleasantly surprised that it was a lot less tacky than expected, and actually did a very good job of educating an addle-brained layabout like myself to the hardships of the time (the fact that it pissed it down for the first half of the day, turning the ground to mud, actually added an air of authenticity). Victorian London, awesome fashions aside, was probably not a huge barrel of laughs - unless you were filthy rich (not just filthy). On the tail end of the industrial revolution, I should imagine that grime, noise, disease, inescapable poverty, endemic crime and a lot of other miscellaneous misery were the order of the day. Small wonder those who could sold everything they owned in cities all over Britain, to gamble on a ticket to Australia and other parts of the colonies for the goldrushes - a continuing theme of the 19th century. Poor buggers, a lot of them did not exactly find the good life they were expecting, though of course some did become hideously wealthy. There's no getting away from how hard it would be working in these conditions - boys as young as 11 were shoved into the mines, and the backbreaking (and often fruitless) labour defined the spirit of the area for generations. Once most of the easy to get at gold (i.e. at the surface / in rivers) had dried up, there was still tons more below the surface. Extracting this was obviously beyond the means of most independant workers, so huge mining companies were set up to drill out the deposits, usually in quartz seams. The conditions were completely atrocious - dangerous, filthy, deafeningly loud, dark, hot, humid - not to mention the health dangers of all the dust. There wasn't much in the way of worker's rights or unions, and it was a hard, hard life. Other contributing factors eventually led to the Eureka Stockade - a rebellion that took place in 1854, which although didn't technically achieve it's aims, became known as the 'Birth of Australian Democracy'. The symbol of the revolt was the Eureka Flag, still used as an emblem for a wide variety of causes (there were several people wearing T-shirts with it on around town - I'm not absoloutely sure why this was). It depicts the Southern Cross - visible on the flags of Australia and New Zealand, and also the night sky.

This is the sort of place you can learn a little about a lot in a short space of time - it's always interesting how different strands of history and other subjects meet up with each other at certain points. I must confess that, other than electrical and heat conductivity, I had only a vague inkling as to why gold was valued so highly ... why not some other material ? Aside from looking nice, the answer is quite simple : it doesn't change much. It's quite uniform, and once you've got it out of the ground, you can put it out the way for years and years. Provided someone doesn't nick it, it will be exactly as left - it won't corrode or evaporate or anything else. Thus it was very popular with early merchants and traders - the fact that it's not exactly easy to find made it ideal for a form of money. There was also a rudimentary stock exchange going on, with shares in mining companies being sold to raise the capital for equipment etc. Many of the subjects discussed at Sovereign Hill were echoes of events going on elsewhere in the British Empire. It's easy to imagine the long term effect on a nation's psyche with events such as these - aside from the convict history (more on this in the next post), the lives of the people involved would have been based almost entirely around sheer hard work. Much stock was taken on the reliance of oneself, but also the importance of other people, appreciation of hearty food (rare that it was), and games and music in the camps that provided a relief, however brief, from the toil of the day.



There's a very remote chance you might still find some fluvial gold (i.e. found loose in water). This is me having a go at panning for it. Seven days I wasted on this, with the bare minimum of vittles ... did I find any ? Did I fu [post edited by Blogspot administrators due to outrageously coarse language]













Once the shiny stuff is out of the ground, it needs to melted down (at a temperature of just over 1000 C), for removing impurities and forming into handy bars - this is a demonstration of how the process works. The chap on the left there, in true Blue Peter 'here's one I did earlier' style, takes a pot of molten gold and pours it directly into a cast. He then dumps the lot into a water trough (producing an impressive amount of steam in the process, I almost expected him to start cackling or something), and in the space of a couple of minutes it goes from being over a thousand degrees to being cool enough to touch. About the size of two large chocolate bars, in English pounds it's worth around 28 grand.










Poop poop ! The 1850s answer to "Pimp My Ride". I do love Victorian era transport. Perhaps because I grew up in a house with a Penny Farthing parked in the hall. Given that I won't have a car when I get back, and my normal bike has got dodgy brakes, I think it may become my main mode of transport. If my parents have sold it in my absence, I shall never forgive them - they're crafty buggers, can't turn my back for a minute.







This was unexpected ... Neutral Milk Hotel have apparantly reformed. Yay !

Chairman Of The Bored

Spring is finally here, sidling in like a compunctious wombat. The established cliche of Melbourne is that you can experience all four seasons in one day (Michael Fish would probably have something to say about that, but he'd be wrong). On the left we have the view over the south bank of the Yarra river, with Federation Square (leading off to the angular Melbourne film institute) in the middle. Dave and Jodie have now left for New Zealand - it was great hanging out with the guys for a few weeks, and I really hope we get to hook up again in NZ. While they were still here, we accompanied them to Genevieve Gauckler's exhibition - there were some good 'cut up' / digital collage works, I found the fast food and medical technology ones particularly interesting.

We also went to a retrospective look at the 'Skins And Sharps' culture of late 60s/70s Melbourne. From the photographs and film footage, it did not seem too distant from similar movements in Britain of the time, but with an edge that was distinctly their own. While I find the prominence and glorification of violence abhorrent, all the other factors of the movement seemed to be a distillation of youth culture - underage drinking, sexual politics and of course loud, urgent music (which was typical of the Aussie rock scene, and was a precursor to bands such as AC/DC). Stories of drinking and fighting up and down Swanston St. (now the main artery of the Central Business District) abound - a favourite trick was to fill the tram lines with petrol and throw a match into it. Very different to the mass of commuters and tourists lining up outside the cafes this morning. As Dan pointed out, this was very much their own scene, very particular to a certain time and place and not easily bought into - you couldn't just walk into high street shops and buy the required CDs and uniform to associate with a group of people in magazines that looked cool. I should imagine there was little room for likely pretenders. It was also interesting that the kids involved were a lot younger than I was expecting - starting at about 12, you would have been considered an old man by 19. It got me thinking about some of the paradoxes and ironies that occur within cultures such as these - a recurring theme is always conflict and nonconformity - towards parents, other groups and of course the authorities. Yet for all the championing of nonconformity towards outward society, there always seems to be the inward pressure of conforming to a specific set of attitudes within that group. The immediate reaction is to write it off as moronic, and I don't think I'll ever agree with the unrelenting machismo and violence, but it's important to remember just how young some of the "kids" involved were. There's a lot to be said for good employment rates, decent education, not to mention available entertainment - I think boredom is a factor which is much ignored a lot of the time. One anomaly in the picture was the clothing - aside from the boots and trousers you'd expect, multicolour knitted cardigans featured heavily. In the context of the time and people, it would have been de rigueur and dead sharp ... wear them today and you'd be booted out of a Belle & Sebastian gig for being too twee. Funny how certain items of clothing become hot retro items, and others from the same time get ridiculed.

I had a conversation with one of my friends recently, who asked if I was going to come from 12 months of travel "a bit of a hippy". I'm not quite sure what that means ... I'd guess she means more relaxed and less of a grumpy git. We're at the halfway mark, and to some degree that's the case ... physical discomforts bother me slightly less, however I'm finding it more and more difficult to ignore the attitudes that I disagree with. The standard cliches of backpacking seem to be lazing around on beaches, hiking mountains, riding around on buses and "talking to loads of cool people". We've done some of that, but a good amount of the people I've met I would not describe in any way as "cool". Depends on the definition of course - if you count random aggression in the street, or a misogynistic, homophobic or casually racist attitude then yes. They were pretty cool.

Probably not so surprising, this sort of shit is often pushed through mainstream entertainment, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. I particularly get annoyed with Hollywood action films that seem to be getting dumber, more sexist and more full of product placement by the minute. It's not so much the fact that they exist that depresses me (freedom of speech and expression, after all) - it's the fact that so many people choose to sell themselves out to this sort of attitude. This was one of a number of factors which prompted me to get out of England in the first place in the attempt to go and broaden my mind a bit, and hopefully talk to some nice and interesting people. That's not really happened as much as I'd liked, and Q.F.S. I feel as bored, irritated, hacked off and alienated as I did in England. For all you Red Dwarf fans out there, and remember the Timeslides episode, I feel like Dave Lister does at the beginning. Perhaps I should get some bubble wrap, paint it red and write Tension Sheet on it.

Maybe I've been in St. Kilda too long. It's a bit like a whistlestop tour of social contrasts and problems - in a five minute walk you can see happy families on the beach, destitution, prostitution, the screaming insane, discarded syringes, 20-somethings getting smashed in the meat markets, trendy 30-somethings in the cafes and a great many people just trying to mind their own business. Good for people watching, but I'm beginning to ask just what it is I'm doing there, and I'm scratching my head trying to think of anything genuinely groundbreaking or constructive that I've done in the last two months. I don't think there really is anything - perhaps it's all been a big waste of time. Or maybe it's good to add a bit of perspective, and to remember just what a fortunate position I'm in. It would be a bit one dimensional if there was nothing to get annoyed about, and I went on this trip to find out a bit more about how the world is ("full of arseholes" perhaps).

Anyway, the best thing about life is being able to laugh, so here's some stuff that at least made me grin :


"FOOTBAAAALL !"

I'm not usually one for sporting events, as I find most sport utterly boring. However ... I do like drinking and shouting in public, and AFL (Aussie rules football) seems to be a game that is sufficiently fast paced and frenetic to hold my attention. We went off to the Melbourne / St. Kilda game at the MCG, part of the four week finals series. That's Graydon and Leanne on the left, two of our housemates.











The pitch is roughly the shape and size of a cricket pitch (AFL being a game that came about as a way for cricket players to stay in shape over the winter). It's very different to British football, in fact being totally unrelated. The game takes place over four quarters, ostensibly twenty minutes a piece but with stoppages usually closer to thirty. It's a long game alright, but very popular - attendance was around 60,000 for this game (venue capacity being 100,000).








Watch out, son ! A nifty catch by a St. K player could end in trouble very soon ...

I like this game because it's very fast paced, there doesn't seem to be a lot of unnecessary and complex rules, and there's a lot of, well, scuffles. Naively, Graydon asked me to provide a rolling commentary on the video he shot. The game is now played by five teams simultaneously, on ponies, with 39 players a side.










Party on, dude ! Inter-quarter entertainment came in the form of a load of beers and meat pies. And some kids going bonkers two rows in front, making crude banners and driving their parents up the wall.











Shit ! That was a goal ! St. K belt one in. As the ball has gone through the middle two posts, that counts for six points - get it between one of the middle posts and outermost ones and that counts as a 'side' - one point. The Saints put up a sterling effort for the greater part of the game, but let it slip in the final quarter when The Demons barged their way to victory. Final score was St. Kilda 72 (10 goals, 12 sides), with Melbourne winning at 90 (13, 12).









A flock of birds flew over the stadium at half time. It was so beautiful etc. etc.















The only gig I've been to since The Minority was at Hi Fi in the CBD. We were there primarily to see The Midnight Juggernauts, on the advice of Dave and Jodie. First on was Talk Show Boy, one of the most original and entertaining acts we've seen so far. It was a simple enough setup - Adrian plugs in his iPod, starts the backing tracks of his own creation and then runs around all over the venue screaming into his mic. He also cracked the following joke : "People who are able to make music that don't" - that certainly hit home :(




Unfortunately, the rest of the gig wasn't so interesting - in fact we left in the middle of the Valentinos set. It was the usual sort of stylised 'indie'-rock, very Strokes / BRMC influenced. They should have been called something like "Thatcher's Crotch", their music was that conservative.



Actually, there was some other live music to be had. I heard the sound of a drumkit as I walked up Swanston St. last week. With nothing better to do I followed the sound up to the State Library. And saw this ... Melbourne's finest law enforcers playing at being rock stars. I sidled up to one of their colleagues and demanded to know just what in Blue Blazes was going on. It turns out it was some of sort of PR event to show the public the friendlier side of the force. So I stuck around to see them go through a covers set including Forever Young by Alphaville (enjoying another go as part of the soundtrack to Napoleon Dynamite), and AC/DC's It's A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna Rock n Roll. They got some random members of the public to help out on that one - never one to resist making a berk of myself in public, I obviously helped them out.




Hands up ! It looked like everyone in town turned up and started dancing - much like an end scene from several shit 80s movies (Caddyshack, I'm looking at you). The kids in the audience obviously thought all of this was great.














I don't care what anyone says, this is a good look. Cops in kilts and aviator shades with bagpipes. They even went so far as to have a riff-off with the guitarist on an AC/DC song.

















The cynical view to take would be "Why are they mucking around with guitars instead of going prowling for villains ?". Charitably, I gave 'em the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the officers involved would have been on their days off anyway. As a PR stunt, it seemed to work very well - the whole of the area around Latrobe and Swanston Sts. seemed abuzz with people relaxing and enjoying themselves.













Romance is not dead in St. Kilda ! You can't go anywhere without seeing someone declaring their undying passion for someone else in a patch of semi-dry concrete. Or even consummating a chance encounter with a short-term beau, no rare sight on Inkerman. They went one further the other day - by writing it in the sky. Oddly enough our mate Chris in Edinburgh had sent us a load of CDs through the post, and I noticed this not long after picking them up. Splendid !






Yahh ! Your computer's rubbish - it don't run Doom or nuffink ! Actually this is CSIRAC, the only first generation computer still in existence. Currently parked up at Melbourne Museum, this photo really does not do justice to the scale of the machinery on display. A system that takes up almost an entire room, back when people had to properly think about the programs they entered (on punch cards, natch). Trying to find a fault on one of these bastards must have absoloutely sucked. However, some things have always been the same - I was not in the least fooled by pictures of saucy 50s women winking and pointing at the valves. In almost exactly the same way you get some token model (usually wearing thick rimmed glasses for "authentic geekiness") on every advert from small scale web hosting to mainframe vendors. No doubt designed to appeal to the Beavis And Butthead element of every delusional nerd. Listen, I've been in IT long enough to know that this is just not the case. I have never, ever been interrupted in my inspections of the rows of "blinken lichten" by some strumpet with a penchant for discussing superconductivity. Pity.







Cockroach Kitchen ! Part of the natural science part of Melbourne Museum. Yes, these are live cockroaches - they were scurrying about and clicking angrily at each other to wash the frying pan. It has become abundantly clear that I need my own museum to fill up with rad stuff, oddities and curios.













Complete with three flying ducks. This particular detail had me crying with laughter, though it never did become clear why the canteen carnival existed in the first place.










I'd have liked to have a photo of a possum somewhere, but those things are batshit insane and I'm basically scared of them. I tried to take a photo, the sound that came out of it's mouth was not of this world :(

Gig photos - Glovebox / The Minority

Last Thursday we went along to see local Melbournians The Minority again, as they were playing at Revolver in Prahran - I've stuck some photos up here in case those that were there want to see them ... Concert photography is something I've had an interest in for a while, but never really got round to doing it properly. Seeing as I'm trying to work out the ins and outs of my new SLR, I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to practice a bit more. I managed to get hold of a second hand 50mm prime lens, which opens up to a marvelous aperture of f/1.4 - thus letting ridiculous amounts of light in. Handy, because (in my opinion) using flash at a gig is an annoyance, both to the bands and to the rest of the audience (especially in a smaller, crowded venue). This really came home watching some of the gigs in Sydney - there were a couple of guys wandering around with huge zooms and powerful external flashes, all very impressive equipment wise but was it strictly necessary I wondered ? And were they really taking in the music at the same time ? No doubt the images looked quite nice, but if it's at the expense of some basic manners then no thank you. Anyway, it's quite a challenging environment sometimes, but I'm learning a lot from my mistakes. Experimenting with different metering modes and how to focus rapidly (auto focus modes seem to be a bit useless here, because everyone moves so quickly) - will hopefully get some other gigs in before we leave.

Support was from a band called Glovebox - a sort of funk, disco quartet (f/1.4, 1/250, converted to grayscale because of dodgy colour from the lights).

















Glovebox again (f/1.4, 1/320)

















As mentioned before, one of my favourite things about live music is watching the expression of whoever's drumming. A reasonably quick shutter speed helped capture the expression of Animelly from The Minority, who it has to be said moves around a fair bit. Perhaps a slightly slower one would have blurred the sticks more (I like that sometimes).

(f/2, 1/125)
















Wish I'd had a drumkit when I was younger :(

(f/2.8, 1/200)
















The mysterious Keg, guitarist of The Minority. The photos don't always turn out right - this one demonstrates quite neatly the problem with smaller venues. For some reason the lighting nearly always is skewed towards the magenta end of things. If you're not careful a lot of the images just come out far too red - I learnt to watch the light sequences carefully in the end. Perhaps using a narrower metering mode would probably have helped here too as his shirt is way overexposed compared to the hair etc.


















Eliza with Animelly in background

(f/5.6, 1/125)

















I always say you can tell how good a band is by how much they roll around on the floor. This is Ross, singer and keyboardist - a damn nice bloke offstage as well.

(f/1.4, 1/250)

















(f/1.8, 1/250)



















(f/1.8, 1/250)

















He just eats cake ! End of the gig, you can hear the associated song here.

(f/2.5, 1/1250)
















On the way home - I've included this because Dave just looks so happy to be on the tram. He loves 'em !

(f/2.5, 1/60)

Congratulations !!

Congratulations to my sister Kate, and her boyfriend Tim, who have just told me they are engaged !! These two splendid urchins rang me up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning to give me the news - I am of course very very pleased for them both. I was probably quite incoherent on the phone, as I was in the middle of a dream in which I was talking to Kate ... and being woken up by her and having to talk on the phone was a pretty surreal experience. So sorry if I was a bit non-plussed at first ! Tim has also asked for me to be his best man (sharing joint responsibilities with Hugh) - a role which I'm honoured and thrilled to accept. I shouldn't think there'll be a lack of annecdotes for the speech as Tim and I have got drunk together about a thousand times. I am pleased that my sister has had the good sense to marry someone who is reckless enough to kiss a whole prawn on the eye.