No dogs in Gundagai

NINE MILES FROM GUNDAGAI

~ Jack Moses

I've done my share of shearing sheep,

Of droving and all that,

And bogged a bullock team as well,

On a Murrumbidgee flat.

I've seen the bullock stretch and strain,

And blink his bleary eye,

And the dog sit on the tucke rbox

Nine miles from Gundagai.

I've been jilted, jarred and crossed in love,

And sand-bagged in the dark,

Till if a mountain fell on me,

I'd treat it as a lark.

It's when you've got your bullocks bogged

That's the time you flog and cry,

And the dog sits on the tucker box,

Nine miles from Gundagai.

We've all got our little troubles,

In life's hard, thorny way.

Some strike them in a motor car

And others in a dray.

But when your dog and bullocks strike

It ain't no apple pie,

And the dog sat on the tucker box

Nine miles from Gundagai.

But that's all past and dead and gone,

And I've sold the team for meat,

And perhaps some day where I was bogged,

There'll be an asphalt street,

The dog, ah! well he got a bait,

And thought he'd like to die,

So I buried him in the tucker box,

Nine miles from Gundagai.

Poor old Gundagai appears to be a country town in decline. Old and worn.  I may be wrong.  It may be vibrant during the day, but in the setting sun on a stray Saturday in January, it was like a ghost town.    Everyone may have been at the local greasy RSL club for tea.  

  

Poem: The North Queensland Register, 14 January 1924

Photo: Main street of Gundagai, New South Wales, not near the Dog on the Tucker Box Memorial.

Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Even though the sound of it

Is something quite atrocious

If you say it loud enough

You'll always sound precocious

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Guess what we went to see?!

Adapted from the beloved books by Australia's own Pamela (P.L.) Travers and the classic 1964 Walt Disney film, MARY POPPINS was playing at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne during our road-trip.  We booked in advanced and were looking forward to it immensely. 

I love a bit of musical theatre and this production exceeded all expectations.  Go people, go.  It is magic, unbelievable.  The stage effects are completely mesmerising.  The cast are brilliant.  Verity Hunt-Ballard plays Mary exquisitly and Matt Lee (So You Think You Can Dance judge) plays Burt to a tee.  Philip Quast and Marina Prior are Mr and Mrs Banks.  Great talent all of them, plus the handful of children playing Jane and Michael, and every single other cast member, known and unknown Aussie singers and dancers.  We were sitting way up in the Gods but it was still a totally engaging experience.  We sang and danced out of the theatre all the way up to Chinatown and the Myer Christmas window displays in the Bourke Street Mall.

Now I'd better go and continue tidying up after the trip.  The Christmas tree is still up and there is dust everywhere and odd bits of clutter on spare ledges and bench tops.  The laundry beast is growling and threatening to invade all available space. I could do with Mary, really I could, to get things back on even keel.  

And if she were here, she would say, "Enough is as good as a feast. Come along, please. Let me look at you. Well, you're not as well turned out as I'd like. Still, there's time. There's time. Spit spot! And off we go."

{this moment]

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. SouleMama

Steep Learning Curves

The train station escalator at Parliament Station, Melbourne

Request to a Year
~ Judith Wright

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,

I should like it to be the attitude

of my great- great- grandmother,

legendary devotee of the arts,

who having eight children

and little opportunity for painting pictures,

sat one day on a high rock

beside a river in Switzerland.

And from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.
Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

A ride at the water park adventure playground in Geelong, Victoria

 A limestone sinkhole garden at Mount Gambier, South Australia

A cliff view near the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, Victoria

We encountered lots of steep situations during our holidays which required us to hold hands.  They made for great holiday photo opps.  Reflecting back, it reminds me of how many different sights we saw despite the long sameness of the journey.   New places sort of sneak up on you when you are on the road.  Shifting three kids out of the car at every sight-seeing stop and buckling them back in was a bit fatiguing, and after a while they started to moan (except when a playground was involved).  "Aw..not again!"  They'd make good coach travellers on whistle-stop tours.

My Country

My Country

~ Dorothea McKellar (1885–1968)

The love of field and coppice

Of green and shaded lanes,

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running in your veins.

Strong love of grey-blue distance,

Brown streams and soft, dim skies

I know, but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of drought and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror

The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,

All tragic to the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold hush of noon,

Green tangle of the brushes

Where lithe lianas coil,

And orchids deck the tree-tops,

And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When, sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!

Land of the rainbow gold,

For flood and fire and famine

She pays us back threefold.

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze…

An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land

All you who have not loved her,

You will not understand

though Earth holds many splendours,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

The dry plains of South Australia outside Blanchetown - a Murray River township 135km north-east of Adelaide, and 275 kms from the Murray Mouth. 

Miles and miles from flood-ravaged Queensland.  Same country, world's apart.

Back home: Reflecting on the journey

Well. Here's an Aussie town that wasn't flooded when we drove through during our mega-Christmas road trip from Canberra to Adelaide and back... the long way.   Four thousand, two hundred kilometres later. Truly.  Two weeks to get there and two days to get home.

In the 1850s, Euroa began to grow due to traffic generated by the gold rush. Ned Kelly, Australia's best-known bushranger, roamed the ranges around Euroa, holding up the National Bank in town during 1878.

The commercial centre of Euroa stretches along part of Binney Street and Railway Street and features a number of historical buildings including the post office (built in 1890) and one of the former National Bank buildings (1885).

The old National Bank in Euroa, Victoria.

We stopped at the fabulous Burke's Bakery for a meat pie and a milkshake.

We passed the Flam Shan Chinese restaurant.

We walked down the street to the local IGA supermarket to buy batteries for Little Wanna's new camera and admire the streetscape at the roundabout.

We also encountered the first and only locust plague between Albury and an equally sweet town of Chiltern.  Reflecting back now, I'm really over highways and long trips through this vast (dry!) continent.  Where we motored in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the weather was mild.  Actually, unseasonally chilly in Melbourne and along the Great Ocean Road.  We were wearing anoraks and socks on the beaches until the wind turned in from the western desert and whipped up a sandstorm.   Despite my fears of bushfires, flood and pestilence, we had an uneventful journey.  All safe and sound, and home again.  I'm back to work and it's as if I'd never left.  We have some great memories though.

More Adelaide

Today we went to Adelaide Zoo with our chums from home.  The parking was free along Plane Tree Drive for the New Year's public holiday, the weather divine with the bluest of blue skies, and the crowds sparse and polite.  All unexpected bonuses which make one give a little air punch.  We queued to see Wang Wang and Funi, the only giant pandas in the Southern Hemisphere, and sauntered about the zoo gardens alternately viewing reptiles and mammals from the ananconda to the hippopotamus, and all kinds of species in between.   Most of the critters were in their enclosures which was a pleasing change.  I spent far less time than I usually do searching in vain for furry bodies or little faces camouflaged in their artificial surrounds or absent entirely. The noisy gibbons put on a great show - with screeches louder than a whooping security alarm - and thrilling for the children.  The mandrills pointed their alarming, bare, pink bottoms in our direction.  The seals and penguins swam about to cool off from the afternoon heat. The playful meerkats eyed us in a friendly, expectant fashion like puppies.  Little Wanna captured their perky faces up close in 50 photos taken on her sister's camera (a clean out of the memory card is in order I feel).  It was, all in all, an immensely enjoyable day topped off with a stroll across the road to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens to see the mediterranean gardens, the Amazon Waterlily garden and the vast Bicentennial Conservatory full of familiar tropical plants from my Queensland childhood.  We lolled about near a small water feature and let the children wade in their bare feet.  A perfect holiday day.  What will tomorrow bring I wonder?