Thongs

If there were such a thing as a national shoe in Australia, it would have to be the ubiquitous flip-flop. I have not actually seen a celebrity in a tux and thongs, but I have no doubt that it has occurred in my absence.  My ignorance of the occasion simply reflects the fact that I don’t get invited to such events.  Aussies love their thongs.

According to Wikipedia, thongs were inspired by the traditional woven soled zōri or “Jonge sandals”, (hence “jandals”). Woven Japanese zōri were used as beach wear in New Zealand in the 1930s. In the post war period in New Zealand and America, versions were briefly popularized by servicemen returning from occupied Japan. The idea of making sandals from plastics did not occur for another decade.

The modern design was supposedly invented in Auckland, New Zealand by Morris Yock in the 50s and patented in 1957.  This claim has recently been contested by the children of John Cowie, an English-born businessman who started a plastics manufacturing business in Hong Kong after the war. John Cowie and his family emigrated to New Zealand in 1959. Despite ‘jandal’ being commonly used in New Zealand to describe any manufacturer’s brand, the word Jandal has been a trademark since 1957, for a long time owned by the Skellerup company. In countries other than New Zealand, jandals are known by many other names.

In Australia they are known as thongs. The first pair were manufactured there by Skellerup rival Dunlop in 1960. Thongs took off in popularity after being worn by the Australian Olympic swimming team at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. Thongs now come in a variety of shoe styles other than the traditional flat sandal, such as women’s heels, slides, and wedges.The shoes gained popularity as celebrities started wearing them and high end designers started producing them. Kari Sigerson and Miranda Morrison, founders of Sigerson Morrison, added a kitten heel to flip-flops.

Havaianas is a Brazilian brand of flip-flop that gained world recognition in 1998 after the company developed a style of the sandals for the World Cup that featured the Brazilian flag. Although Havaianas flip-flops have only become wildy popular in the United States in the last five years after many celebrities were seen wearing them, the brand has been around since 1962. The brand’s famous slogan “Havaianas. The Real Ones.” originated in the 1970s as a response to other companies making knock-off versions of the flip-flops. The shoes are known for their comfortable soles and straps. The name Havaianas means Hawaiians in Portuguese.

Sharing a bus trip with ten Australians for eight days taught me the importance of thongs to citizens down under. Unless we were in for a difficult hike over treacherous terrain, everyone wore flip-flops almost all the time.  The swimwear that shares the name was not popular among our group, but then, we were an older crowd. The younger members of our group may have been more demure than the norm, embarrassed into covering up for their elders.

As for the titillating undergarment made infamous by Monica Lewinsky?  I’m not even going to hazard a guess.  You’ll have to find that out yourself.

Books in the head and beside the bed

My father grew up poor, hitting his formative years during the great depression.  Most of his energy went into getting away from that poor place and staying there.  He did it by working his way through college and applying himself diligently to things he had trouble with, like scientific German.  Most of his choices were dictated by circumstance.

The only narrative he subscribed to was the one at the heart of the American dream– achieving success through good fortune and hard work.  He regarded all fiction as frivolous, from airport and beach books to Shakespeare and Tolstoy.  I suspect many men of his generation felt the same.

Naturally, I became an English major, taking up with every literary floozy that came along, from “Catcher in the Rye” to “Atlas Shrugged.”  It wasn’t long before I went hard core, attending poetry readings and filling notebooks with everything that came into my head. It was infatuation, not real dedication, that led me down the literary path.  I was the young man Garrison Keillor mocks so gently on “The Prairie Home Companion,” the one he sees in himself.

I have come to see that books are my escape and my refuge in unsettled times. I remain omnivorous, devouring books of all kinds, shapes and sizes, hardcovers, paperbacks and audio files.  I have yet to purchase an electronic reader, but I can see one in my future. It is the perfect format for expensive, expendable travel guides as well as a great device for airplane reading.

The books I read and the ones I download from Audible take me into different worlds and different times.  I love mysteries, and Donna Leon has escorted me back to Venice several times in the fine company of Commissario Guido Brunetti. Louise Penny has immersed me in the surprisingly complex life of a small village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec with charming Inspector Gamache. With Charles Todd I have travelled all over England at the end of World War I inside the troubled mind of a Scotland Yard inspector plagued with guilt, having had his best soldier shot for insubordination. Stieg Larsson has me hooked by the sexy and sexist, over-caffeinated and nicotine-addicted Swedes.  I can’t wait for the third book in the series.

During the past week, the fine voice of Simon Vance reading Kate Grenville’s “The Secret River” has transported me back to Australia while I’ve been walking the circuit of East Campus of Duke University.  Set during the days of the first settlers, it conjures up a simple man whose desires lead him to the darkest places. He is one of the victims of the British impulse to banish the petty thieves of London to “terra nullus,” the continent of Australia.  The injustice affects him for life, of course.  But the aboriginals bear the brunt of the settlers’ fear, ignorance and firepower.  It is a brilliant book.

“The Wayfinders”, by Wade Davis, is a fascinating tour through a handful of aboriginal cultures around the world. Davis suggests that the extinction of cultures is as risky to the future of our species as the precipitous decline of plants and animals. The San people of the Kalahari have found extraordinary ways to survive without water; the Polynesians sail 10,000 kilometers without a sextant or compass and manage to find a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean; the peoples of the Amazon rain forest harvest plants for medicine that we have yet to name.  The subtitle says it all:  Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.

You can cosy up to a good book or take a bumpy ride, but it’s a great way to see and hear the world. And you don’t have to be an English major.

New Orleans Bound

The French settlers of Acadie must have wondered how they had offended God when New England militia marched into the village of Grand Pre and locked up the men and boys in the church. The proclamation of the British colonel said they were to be transported. Like the petty thieves of London, they had got themselves on the wrong side of British law. The law had been conceived by Parliament and the new Governor, who insisted that the people inhabiting the land he called Nova Scotia take an oath of allegiance to the Crown.  It was 1755.

Thus began the expulsion of the Acadians, peasants who had been living for over a hundred years in the fertile parts of Acadie, a peninsula bordering the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic ocean. They had dyked the sea like the Dutch, reclaiming rich soil off the bottom of the Bay of Fundy for farmland. They had prospered, skirting the constant wars between the French and English like squirrels living among wolves. Their day of reckoning became almost inevitable in 1710, when British troops took a strategic fort they called Fort Anne, not far from where the Princess of Acadia sails. From that point on, the land mass of Nova Scotia became British, while the population was French.

The British plan was to load the Acadians on ships and scatter them in the colonies along the Eastern seaboard, but they had not counted on the intransigence of the English colonists. French-speaking Catholics were not warmly  welcomed by English-speaking protestants, so many of the ships sailed on, seeking a place to offload their human cargo. They settled on Louisiana. The name of the people transported there was soon corrupted from “Acadien” to “Cajun.” The swamps and bayous of this new place were as different from Nova Scotia as anyone could imagine.

This year the American Association of Law Schools chose New Orleans for its annual conference. My wife had decided to attend some time ago, so I packed a suitcase for a trip to the home of jazz and Mardi Gras soon after arriving in Durham. Fortunately, we had booked into the hotel where the conference was held. The city of New Orleans was freezing!

What with the miserable weather and my lack of due diligence as a tourist, the visit was less than satisfying. I barely skimmed the surface, astonished at my own ignorance of the place, from Mardi Gras rituals to the Battle of New Orleans, which helped saved the country’s independence in the War of 1812.

It was a city I knew from books and jazz and television, a city of the imagination. I had no idea that Degas spent six months here before he became famous. His mother came from a prominent French-Creole family and two of his brothers settled in the city, engaging in the cotton business during its slow demise as an engine of enterprise. Degas did one famous painting here of his family’s cotton office, but his relatives and the place unsettled him.

There is a National Historic Site in Grand Pre commemorating the Expulsion of the Acadians and the long narrative poem it inspired– “Evangeline.” Although “Le Grand Derangement” was not genocide, the Acadians were certainly hard done by. And, as the disastrous hurricane relief efforts have shown, that was just the beginning.  The poor people of Louisiana are the Haitians of North America and the city on the Mississippi with the fascinating past has a very tenuous future.

On the Road Again, Grand Pre to Durham

After the long haul flight from Melbourne, Australia to Halifax, Nova Scotia at the northeastern point  of North America, heading down to Durham, North Carolina would seem to be dead easy.  There are no direct flights, but an itinerary through Washington DC was the next best thing.  We were going to need a car in Durham, however, and the only way to get one there was for me to drive down.

At one point we contemplated a rendezvous in our nation’s capital.  I would leave a couple of days before she did.  We would catch up with friends in DC over dinner and sail on down to North Carolina together.  That was before our caretaker told us he was going to be in Acapulco, Mexico so he wouldn’t be there to close up the house.

When Richard is around to take care of things, we can walk away from the old place, but his absence changed things completely.  In January a big storm can knock down the power poles and in no time the pipes will freeze.  To hedge our bets, I would have to drain the plumbing, something I haven’t done in a long time.

It is some 1400 miles (2250 kms) from Grand Pre, Nova Scotia to Durham, North Carolina heading down through the mess of New York/New Jersey.  I wanted to avoid that, so we figured out an alternate route through the hills of Pennsylvania that added mileage but cut out some of the stress.

You can eliminate some of that distance by taking a ferry across the Bay of Fundy.  I decided to shoot for the very last sailing of the year. At noon on the 31^st, when my wife and daughter were heading into Halifax for an evening of celebration, I poured antifreeze into toilets and drained a hot water tank.  I had just enough time to drive to Digby and catch the 4:30 sailing of The Princess of Acadia.  It would not be much of a New Year’s Eve, but it would put me in St John, New Brunswick before bedtime.

I had made only one serious “Down Under” driving blunder since returning to North America. I pulled out of our laneway on automatic pilot, heading out onto Highway One in the wrong lane.  The driver coming my way looked up in alarm, breathing a sigh of relief as I made a quick correction. I would have to remember NOT to do that on the long drive down south.  Americans are quite fussy about their cars and they carry guns.

In the end, the journey down the eastern seaboard was uneventful.  I did manage to get stuck in the sloping parking lot of the motel in St. John.  Fortunately, the Vietnamese owner was well equipped to get hapless drivers back on the highway.  I followed a snowplow for miles in northern Maine,
then a sand truck  when the plow pulled off.  Blizzard conditions and sparse traffic made me a little nervous without snow tires or a cell phone.

By the time I reached Marlboro, Massachusetts I was in the road groove.  The lady at the front desk said  there was a decent Italian restaurant at the local mall.  She neglected to tell me that the mall was huge.  I had to enlist the aid of a mall cop to locate the car.  He was smug on his Segway, zipping around like the Prince of Wheels.  I had made his day by looking lost and asking for help.

American road food has to be among the worst in the world, but the hospitality improved as I headed south. My wife’s route route planning and the GPS managed to keep me on track through New Brunswick and all seven states.  It was chilly when I finally arrived, but I left the real wintry weather up north.  There was a new pantry to stock and a new, old house to turn into a nest, a new triumvirate of cities to explore.

I’m in the heart of tobacco land, the home of Bull Durham.  It’s a whole new ball game.

Christmas in a Cold Climate

I have taken a leave of absence from life in Melbourne, Australia and from the blog.  It seems like a good time to return to the writing, even though I won’t be back “down under” for half a year.  It hardly seems worth changing the title to Up and Over to point my readers toward North America.  As I said in a previous post, my wife is on sabbatical for a semester and we are currently in Durham, North Carolina, a state that is definitely south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Our transition here was a brief visit with my son and his family in Portland, Oregon, and a two week holiday at the old place in Nova Scotia.  Grand Pre is a lovely place to spend Christmas as long as the weather doesn’t get too Canadian. Our two hundred year-old house does not have central heating and a howling North wind whips right in.

We were greeted by a cold snap that had us quite concerned for friends from Washington DC who planned to spend Christmas with us, but it warmed up to more seasonal temps by the time they arrived.  Right after they left it got very cold again.  Nova Scotia has always seemed gentler with tourists than long-term residents that way.

I have spent a number of years in hot countries, and the celebration of Christmas in such places always seemed odd.  In Hong Kong, I never got used to the neon-lit, red cloaked Buddhas driving Asian looking reindeer on skyscrapers high overhead.  The European traditions of Christmas seem singularly inappropriate when the weather is 40 degrees centigrade and everyone is heading for the beach or the barbecue.

In Canada, men dream of snow blowers at this time of year. A Muskoka man named Kai Gundt got fed up with his wimpy commercial snow blower and decided to build one with a V-8 engine.  His home-built job cleared his driveway in five minutes, throwing snow over a five story building.  The latest model has heated handlebars and a cup holder.  “I know it goes against the green initiative.  But it really works.  It takes the snow and blows it right back where it came from.”

Fortunately, we have a good stock of dry firewood and fireplaces that were built when people knew how to do it properly.  We laid in groceries and got a lovely tree that just fit into the parlour.  Our daughter did a beautiful job bringing it to life.  On Christmas Eve we went to the local church (which is about the same vintage as our house) and sat in straight back pews for the music and the sermon. It was wonderful to come home and snuggle up under the down comforter.

Today, the weather here in Durham went up to springtime temperatures.  People are out running around in T shirts.  Christmas was only three weeks ago, but our connection with the seasons has been tenuous of late;  it seems like it could have been a century ago.  This is what our village looked like then.

Traveling Teachers

On my recent trip to the Kimberley area in the northwest of Australia, I got a conversational comeuppance.  It is useful to get those every once in awhile as it helps put things in perspective.  I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel a fair amount in my life so far, but there were three Australian teachers on the eight-day Outback trip who made me feel like a nomadic neophyte.  One afternoon they sat under a tree comparing notes about their hikes along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

Not only have I never been to Machu Picchu, I have never been to South America.  There are two entire continents I missed in my wandering.  It occurred to me then that Australian teachers may be the best travelers in the planet.  Lonely Planet was founded by an  Australian couple, after all.  It is still based in Melbourne.

Teachers may not have deep pockets, but they have time, curiosity, and the inclination to explore.  Australia is far from everyplace except Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, and it is fairly homogeneous. Every Aussie student who has managed to accumulate any sort of nest egg will build a “gap” year into his life plan, setting aside time to see some of the world before settling down.  Getting away for a good, long time seems to be in their genetic code.  Since getting anywhere from here seems to take forever, you may as well set aside as much time as you can to enjoy it.  I asked Lynne and Bronwyn, two of the teachers on the trip, to send me a list of countries they had visited.

” I try to take any opportunity to have a new adventure or see something new. This weekend I am heading up to Sydney to visit my daughter who has just shifted up there. I am claiming the saying– ‘I’m always travelling, I love being free’. Not sure if you are aware but this is a line from the Qantas ad. Very appropriate as we stood on the rocks at the Bungles where the latest version was filmed.  Lynne.”    The following is Lynne’s country list.  She put it in alphabetical order.  She is a teacher, after all.  Lynne was the first to tell me I was misspelling the place we visited.  I had failed to place the second “e” in Kimberley.

Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, England, Fiji, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Peru, San Marino, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, The Netherlands, United States, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Vatican City, Vietnam, Wales, Zambia, Zimbabwe

This came from Bronwyn just the other day.  “It is the last class before holidays. I am in the computer room letting them (the students) do what they wish so I am ending as a hero. Going to Noosa for a week (a town north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast in south Queensland) and then? Jannis (daughter)  is doing a road trip up the east coast with another Gap boy. They are living in the car for 6 weeks. They are going to try surfing….

“Well, I have been to Europe including Russia but never the UK. Most of Asia- China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Fiji, New Zealand, BC Canada, Mexico, most of Australia. Have driven Florida to New York and Vancouver to San Diego. It seemed like a lot at the time but now looking at it not much.  Bronwyn.”

Listening to the three teachers talk about their travels was a treat.  I had the sense that they were always learning and challenging themselves.  I’m astonished when I meet people who have traveled a great deal and fail to appreciate differences in language and landscape, traditions and customs.   Especially those who fail to see that other people do certain things better.  Lynne and Bronwyn seem to possess boundless curiosity and a willingness to get out of the comfort zone.  Their students are lucky to have them around to infect them with the travel bug.  Let the infection spread.

Outrage Spreads Over Missing Material

The author of this blog is deeply apologetic over the lack of new pics and stories.  It may be difficult for millions of readers to understand, but yours truly is actually too busy to write at the moment.  How can a man who does not work for a living be too busy, you say?

We are in transition again, and there is a lot of preparation required for this particular move.  On Saturday, we will be traveling back to North America.  We’ll stop in Portland to see my son and his family, spend Christmas in Nova Scotia with our daughter, then head down east coast of the U.S.A.  From January to June we will be in Durham, North Carolina.  My wife will be teaching a course at Duke during a sabbatical semester away from the University of Melbourne.

There has been no shortage of lively events in this part of the world.  The Liberals had such a big fight about a  Labour plan to introduce emissions  trading that Malcolm Turnbull was toppled from leadership.  His team had negotiated with the government to go along with emissions trading and this did not sit well with the more conservative members of the party.  Tony Abbott has taken over.  He’s just challenged Prime Minister Rudd to a series of debates about the emissions trading scheme.

Abbott’s a former Rhodes Scholar, so I’m sure the debate will be intelligent and enlightening.   Australia is one of the biggest contributors to global warming around on a per capita basis (if not the biggest) and the country stands to be severely affected by an increase in temperature.  Weather plays a huge role in bushfires, and the current agricultural practices are unsustainable.

But Aussies, like Americans, are highly suspicious of scientists, intellectuals and environmentalists and they don’t care for change based on something they can’t see.  Even intelligent individuals are capable of convincing themselves that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by tree huggers.  I’m just not sure what they think the purpose is.  What do we stand to gain?  This is not a case of simply wanting to say “I told you so.”

I was happy to see that some young students from Damascus College in Ballarat are committed to countering the spin that is currently coming out of the mainstream media.  They have built themselves a speedy velomobile, and they are currently riding from Darwin to Melbourne.  That is a distance of 3775 kilometers (2360 miles) across the inhospitable Outback.

They started November 29th and hope to arrive on December 9.   They have already ridden across the continent.  Right now they are resting up in Adelaide for the final push.  The aim is to raise funds and awareness about the impact of global warming on the poor people in the world.  Cheer them on or contribute to their quest at “Rage Against Greenhouse Emissions”  at http://roderage.com.au/

Margaret River

The morning of our return flight from Exmouth to Perth, I got a text message followed by a call on my mobile (cell phone).  The departure was going to be delayed by four hours.  We had planned to arrive at Perth airport at 3:30 in the afternoon, allowing us enough time to pick up our rental car and drive to Margaret River before dark.

When we drove past the airport on our way into Exmouth to gas up, I saw the plane on the tarmac.  There had been no explanation for the delay, but I would not be surprised if it had something to do with a certain offshore oil rig.  I phoned the owner of the B&B in Margaret River and the car rental company about the delay, but when we finally arrived in Perth, the Thrifty agent had disappeared.  It took a good half hour to round her up.  It was nearly dark when we started driving toward Margaret River, and we  finally pulled into Rosewood Guest House about 11 PM.

Our host had been diligent, however, and the keys were waiting.   A breakfast menu had been left out and we could even select what we wished to have in the morning.  This was my kind of place.  If you get a breakfast “down under,” it tends to be British– fried eggs and bacon or sausage, baked tomatoes or beans and toast, spaghetti with tomato sauce.  We had stayed in only one B&B that offered more than this, and several that offered less.  One had a shiny cappuccino machine sitting on the kitchen counter, but we were treated to instant coffee from a jar with powdered milk.

The siren call of Margaret River are the vineyards.  The wine business has exploded in recent years, bringing the total up to an impressive 125 wineries.   We were less than assiduous in our tourist duties, dropping in on exactly one, Voyager Estate.  The grounds were gorgeous, based on a South African approach to landscaping and architecture.   The weather and topography are not dissimilar, and Margaret River does very well with white wines and Cabernet blends, exporting much of the output world-wide.

The other main attractions are large limestone caves, fabulous surfing, fine breweries and high quality arts and crafts.  Academic demands required my wife to spend more time at the internet cafe than I would have liked, but we did squeeze in a bike ride to the beach, a visit to a gift shop with beautiful, hand-made furniture, a tour of the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse, and a long walk among the towering trees near the town of Pemberton.

We managed to rendezvous for lunch and dinner with Graham Reeks and his lovely wife, Ella.  Graham is a fellow expat scribbler I met in Melbourne who is on a long driveabout.  His blog is called ofnofixedabode, and he has just written a wonderful post about the western woods. Check it out with the link I have to his site.

Thanks to our hosts at the B&B, we began each day with a fine breakfast and plenty of good coffee.  For me, all’s well that begins with a good breakfast.   Buttermilk waffles or blueberry blintzes are perfect, but something other than English fare is just fine by me.  Thanksgiving in Australia, reason to celebrate.

Sunsets and Manta Rays

When we booked our flight to Exmouth, I assumed we would be boarding a small plane.  I was hoping the aircraft would be post WW II, and that the pilot wouldn’t have to start the engine by spinning the propeller.  My error was in assuming that tourists would make up the majority of the passengers.  It turned out the SkyWest flight was a shuttle service for off-shore oil workers. In the two hours it took our packed plane to reach its destination, I learned more about tools for oil rig work than I ever wished to know.  The airport for the town is located 37 kms south of town, which makes the drive south to Coral Bay a reasonable two hour run.

I was dismayed to discover that I would have return the car with something approaching a full tank of petrol.  This meant driving back past the airport and on into Exmouth before dropping off the rental car at the airport.   Between the tarmac and Coral Bay, there are thousands of termite mounds and some cattle with precious little shade.  The Cape Range separates the road from the ocean, hiding some rugged and forbidding-looking terrain.

The Ningaloo Reef extends about 260 kilometers (163 miles) from North West Cape (north of Exmouth) to Amherst Point, south of Coral Bay.  Unlike the Great Barrier Reef on the other side of Australia, this fringing reef  starts only 100 meters off shore.  There are over 500 species of fish, 250 species of corals and 600 species of molluscs.  It is a snorkeler’s paradise.

Coral Bay (population 160) hosts thousands of divers and snorkelers every year, particularly when the giant whale sharks are in the area– March through mid June.  Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean and the largest cold blooded animals on earth.  They are filter feeders, so swimmers can have a close encounter with ten-ton creatures without getting stepped on or eaten.  In the pictures I’ve seen, they are beautiful.

Thanks to a very early flight, we arrived at our hacienda in Coral Bay in plenty of time to kick back and wait for the room to be made ready.  Our hostess made it clear that we had arrived too early and shouldn’t expect miracles from her staff.  The sun was already hot and the flies were already out in full force.  At least there were comfortable chairs and good coffee available.

We didn’t realize until later that the Melbourne Cup, “the race that stops the nation,” had followed us across the continent.  The three minute race for three year-olds would require the entire population of Coral Bay to dress up in fashionable hats and begin their serious drinking before noon.  Everyone was coming to the Ningaloo Reef Resort to celebrate.  On top of the 5 AM wake-up call to catch our flight, we would have to put up with the post-race revelry until way past our bedtime.

But the next day was perfect, as it tends to be in Coral Bay.  We had signed on for a snorkel cruise with Ningaloo Experience, an outfit that has actually been eco-certified.  Peter Shaw, the owner/operator who pioneered the business in the area, limits his groups to 12 and tries to do a little fish education on the side.  The word eco is now used very loosely, but “Pedro” takes it seriously.  I was dismayed to see the word “Eco” plastered on a fleet of ATV vehicles, tempting lazy tourists to go out and find turtles hatching without having to walk.

The outer reef provides sanctuary for whale sharks, turtles, dolphins, dugongs and manta rays.  We were after the rays, those cloaked and elusive creatures of silent movies, sensuously propelling themselves along the sea floor.  We were soon treading water furiously in an attempt to keep up with their effortless pace. Later, there would be time for the little fish and the corals, for a more relaxing time in the giant aquarium we had crossed a country to see.

Our brief stay up north had been dictated by the availability of seats on SkyWest, by the schedule of oil workers.  On both evenings in Coral Bay, our walks took us only a few hundred yards from the resort to Fins Cafe and back.  The setting sun (rising Earth) offered us a stunning, ever changing kaleidoscope, appearing as liquid and colorful as the coral reef itself.  It was a little bit of paradise a long way from home.

Perth and Freo

The notion of returning to Western Australia one month after my trip to the Kimberly seemed crazy on the face of it, but my wife had vacation time coming and she had been impressed by my enthusiasm for W.A., as it is called here.  She was keen to see the Margaret River area just south of Perth, the state capital.  It is renowned for its wineries, tall trees and a spectacular coastline.

When I began putting the trip together, we toyed with several side trips, narrowing it down in the end to Perth, Margaret River and the Ningaloo Reef up north.  We would fly to Perth, stay a couple of days, then catch a local airline up to Exmouth to snorkel in the Indian Ocean at a place called Coral Bay.  A mid afternoon flight back to Perth would give us just enough time to drive down to Margaret River before it got dark.  That was the idea, anyway.  Nothing ever goes as planned.

Looking out over the Swan River from the plateau of King’s Park in Perth, it is hard to imagine the Dutch and French discovering  this place and then sailing on.  But the French were interested in exploring the area for its scientific curiosities and the Dutch were looking for trade goods.  Neither had positive things to say about the area.  It would have created a mess if the French had settled here with the British colony already established in Sydney.  That is still causing trouble in Quebec after 350 years.

On 25 April 1829, Captain Fremantle arrived in the ship HMS Challenger to make preparations for the  Swan River Colony.  On 2 May 1829, he formally took possession of the entire west coast of New Holland on behalf of King George IV.   A few days later, a camp was set up in a bay just south of the head, and the town of Fremantle was established.  It has been occupied ever since.  Two more towns were soon created upriver, Perth and Guildford.

Australians insist on abbreviating any words longer than one syllable, so it is understandable that they have shortened Western Australia and the name of the port of Fremantle,  although how they came up with Freo is a mystery.   The Swan River colony grew very slowly until about 1850, when convicts were brought in to alleviate the labor shortage.  Many of the public buildings in Perth and Fremantle were constructed with convict labor.  The discovery of gold in the 1880’s finally got things rolling for the new settlements.  Mineral wealth continues to drive  the economy.

The highlights of our quick visit were quite a contrast– King’s Park in Perth (which rivals Central Park in New York in size and variety and outdoes it in beauty) and Fremantle Prison.  Within walking distance of the business district, the park is on a bluff overlooking the Swan River.  It has the botanic gardens, of course, an excellent restaurant, a lovely cafe and great gift shop, graceful trees of all kinds and the wildflowers for which Western Australia is known throughout the world.

Fremantle Prison existed in my imagination long before our visit.  I had been taken there on a sea of words when we were living in Washington DC. Donal O’Kelly’s one-man play “The Catalpa”  is based on the true story of the daring rescue of six Irish political prisoners in 1875.  It is a bit of “Moby Dick” followed by “The Great Escape” capped by “Gone With the Wind,” literally.  From New Bedford, Massachusetts to Fremantle, Australia, across the high seas on the whaling ship Catalpa.  It culminates with the first ever ticker-tape parade in New York City.

The romance of theater hardly prepares you for the claustrophobic cells and the scary reality of the hanging room.  The prison was cut from local limestone and built by convicts over an eight-year period in the 1850’s.  It remained in operation until 1991.  Our guide made a distinction between convicts and prisoners which is worth bearing in mind in Australia.  Roughly ten thousand convicts were transported to Western Australia, but transport ceased in 1868.  By the end of the 19th Century, Fremantle Prison was for the incarceration of prisoners.

Our guide, who must have been a former guard, seemed to take a perverse delight in letting us know exactly how miserable the conditions were.  For years, there was no shade in the exercise yards.   There was no heat in winter or fans in summer.   There were no toilets in the cell blocks.   There was one bucket in each cell.   Two men to a cell.  There were no liberal notions of rehabilitation in the air.  This was a place of punishment.

We had made our way from Perth down to Fremantle by ferry, but we were relieved to be able to walk out through the front gates and catch a train back to the City.  It was a quick and easy escape.  One day of “doing time” in Fremantle Prison was time enough for me.