Strangely enough, I'm writing this from just down the road from where I wrote to you last month, so in one way we haven't moved much, though we've actually travelled thousands of miles.
At the moment we are in Narrabri in northern NSW heading towards Goondawindi. and this time last month we were heading through northern NSW on our way to Brisbane. I was under the (mistaken) understanding that the New England Highway would be west of the Divide, and therefore a better route than going up the coast with all the traffic on the Pacific Highway. Wrong! It isn't much further, but the New England seems to criss cross the Divide a number of times, and we seemed to be forever crawling up the hills behind trucks, or smoking the brakes coming down the other side, so it wasn't the pleasant drive I was expecting. In contrast the Pacific Highway going south between Brisbane and Sydney was a much better and flatter road, often divided for long stretches, though of course it was much busier.
However, we eventually made it into Brisbane and lobbed in to a rather swank tourist resort, where we proceeded to sit under the palms around the pool and think of everybody who was coping down south with the last week of term. Poor buggers - want another iced tea? Withstood several serious bouts of torrential rain in our time there. Like most towns in the tropics, when it rains it deluges, and at one point we couldn't see half way across the Brisbane River from the riverbank. Not like Melbourne's pathetic attempts at rain.
Visited several lots of friends while we were there, spending some great time catching up on the years that have flown past - in one case it was 27 years since we had last seen them. Then we moved slowly southwards again to give Mandy her promised surf beach fix before our commitments intervened.
The time difference really messes with your system. One week we were on 'regular' time, then we crossed the border to Qld, and put our clocks back an hour. The following week we were back in NSW, and put our clocks forward an hour. Then a week later daylight saving finished, so we put our clocks back an hour, then a week later we were at camp with kids waking up at 5am. One week were are walking after tea, and the next we are eating tea in the dark. Lucky I'm a person who doesn't like routine.
We have a 'VAST' satellite TV box that brings in free to air TV signals from a satellite conveniently situated over Papua New Guinea courtesy of the Australian Government - we can watch Home and Away thanks to your taxes (and enjoyed the cricket world cup too). Of course it is only available to people in remote areas, and you have to nominate your address. Being remote is ok, but remote and mobile isn't, so we used our Queensland address as that is where we will be most of the time. Of course this means that you get Queensland television stations (and Queensland sport - thank God we didn't choose NSW), and as they are often an hour different in time to where we are, you end up watching the evening news at 4pm, and other similar oddities. Anyway, with daylight saving now over, everybody is back in synch - except the flaming clarvoyant who camped next to us last night and started packing up at 4am this morning in order to get to the morning market in time to set up her card reading booth. I can see a really short life span in her cards.
From Brisbane we mooched slowly southwards, stopping first at Byron Bay. Really disappointed. All the people doing crystal therapy, reading your tea leaves, practising reiki therapy, and making tofu hamburgers with organic mung beans seem to have moved on, or are at least trying to move on when effects of the weed wears off. In their place were heaps of organic coffee houses, and hundreds of camper vans with names like Jucy, Wicked and Spaceship. Far more our scene, but not quite the same unique Byron that it once was, though the smoke still smelled the same. The morning peak rush took me 25 minutes to travel the 2km into the town, so its not a sleepy little town anymore.
From there it was on to Coffs Harbour, Nambucca Heads and Port Macquarie before settling down for a few days over Easter at Tuncurry near Forster (as you have to book a minimum stay to get in anywhere). Kind of a wet Easter, as we believe it was in Melbourne too, but after a couple of weeks of glorious beaches further north it wasn't too hard to deal with.
Then it was off to camp at Toukley (near Gosford) for a week. Where do we start. Well, the camp was organised by Prison Fellowship for 50 primary school aged children who have one or both parents in prison. About 30 boys and 20 girls, with the biggest group being Grade 6 boys. Yep. It wasn't uncommmon for the kids to have no mum, a dad in prison, and being raised by a carer, though there were many permutations. During the GTYK session, we found that one boy had 8 brothers and sisters, though most were of course half bothers and sisters. By the time both your mum and dad have had three relationships it all gets a bit complicated, and most of the indigenous boys on camp seemed to refer to each other as cousins, that is if they weren't brothers. The medication list was as long as your arm, and it took Mandy the entire breakfast session to dispense it all. A decent proportion of the kids were on one spectrum or another, and many had anger issues.
Almost every conversation could be loaded, so you had to be careful with every response. When I glibly told a girl not to worry about the bus being late, it will turn up eventually, she burst into tears, and told me that she had an appointment to meet her mum that afternoon. And just what do you say when somebody in a room asks if God loves criminals? It got quite complicated at times. Every interaction required two adults to be present, so if a kid wanted to go the toilet, you had to find another leader and go as a threesome. That generally meant asking a leader to cover for what you were doing, and another to cover for the second leader who was needed just so you could go around the corner to the toilet. At one stage we had two leaders in the huts, one down the street buying supplies, four leaders chasing two escapees, two leaders attending to a disciplinary issue, and the remaining three leaders trying to keep control of the remaining 40 kids. When the boys staged a mass break out of the hall via a side door, we had nobody to send as you can't go by yourself.
Only one broken arm 10 minutes into the first day, but the little trooper of a girl came back to camp and proceeded to play volleyball and soccer, and do zip-lining, archery and quad bikes with one arm. Almost won the knock out volleyball too!
We expected some behaviour issues and, of course, there were. Many had never had a mature male in an authority role, and they really didn't know how to handle it. Who is this big person telling me what to do? Greg was called 'Sir' much of the camp. Gave him airs and graces. However what I hadn't expected was far more mundane. Most boys had never had a male teach them to bowl a cricket ball, or throw a frisbee, or congratulate them when they eliminated an adult in a game. When you bowled a tennis ball to them, they were really surprised that you "are so good, sir". Guess that nobody has ever bowled to them before.
For all of that, there many lovely kids who just needed some friendship, attention and encouragement. Goodness knows how many games of volleyball, soccer, cricket, frisbee we played, and leaders vs kids was always the highlight. Not sure that many of the boys knew how to react when individual leaders challenged them to bouts of sumo wrestling, and didn't deck them if they got beaten (and I did). They each had a present parcel under their pillow the first night and, yes, they really could keep them which was a highlight of the week for them. We made masks, shot movies, and did activities. Every meal was chock full of carbs. There were chips, wedges, potato gems or hash browns at every meal that wasn't coco pops. Now I like my chips as much as the next person, but its the lettuce leaves that I'm forced to eat all this week to lose the weight again that doesn't impress me. I think that most kids enjoyed it most of the time. Not the most fun camp we have been on, but one of the most satisfying.
We are now cutting up north through the middle of NSW on our way to St George in southwest QLD where Mandy will be starting to teach the girls at the beginning of term 2, which is next week up here. Yesterday we received a message from the farm saying that they were killing the fatted lambs today, and how would we like our lamb cut up. Not a question I've ever been asked before, and I wasn't quite sure how to answer. Our freezer is rather small, so we won't fit much more than a few lamb chops.
Before then we will be dropping in to St George at the weekend where the Australian Campdrafting Championships are being held. Should be fun, and definitely an education for us. The most important thing to learn is what type of Akubra to wear. The wrong style is like wearing white socks to a job interview - no matter what else happens you won't be taken seriously.
Well, that's been our month. Hope yours has been good too, and we'll write again once we have some news to share about our time on the station.
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