Philistines at the gate

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It’s tough seeing Australia’s rich legacy of built heritage so often vanish before your eyes.

And tough watching important buildings slowly fall into disrepair, succumbing to the old ploy of demolition by neglect.

No fun seeing them surreptitiously knocked over in the night by owner-vandals or set alight by arsonists in friction-fire attacks where insurance policies rub up against mortgage papers.

Crook, too, when they’re disappeared by home renovators flying under the radar of planning laws.

Gets nasty and personal when you see the historic house where you and all your schoolmates were born demolished and replaced by a McDonald’s outlet. And worse when old mates who numbered the bricks to rebuild it haven’t done so decades later.

The aqueduct under construction, and the Bow Truss woolstore.

Not unlike the Marshall bluestone cottage demolished for Barwon Heads Road works where locals were assured it would be rebuilt elsewhere. Two levels of government presently shirking any responsibility.

It’s especially tough, however, when demolition of this built fabric of the community is legally sanctioned by authorities.

Nothing short of barbarianism how so many stunning buildings that made Melbourne the greatest city in the world during the gold boom of the 1800s failed to last even 60 or 70 years before they started being ripped down.

By the time of the Melbourne Olympics, most were considered a shameful, ageing disgrace that needed culling in a modern international city under the world’s gaze – never mind that cities in war-torn Europe were rebuilding their shattered architectural treasures.

All culled in the name progress, that weasel-word justifying the Philistine finance-driven destruction of the design, culture, social milieu and beauty within the built form that created our cities. Cradles burnt on the altar of Mammon.

Schools, pubs, churches, grand shops, public institutions, woolstores, any number of homes making up a living museum of Australian architecture have been fuel to the fires of progressive expediency.

Geelong’s been as much as shocker as anyone for bowling over anything with any semblance of legacy, history, heritage, social or cultural connection.

There might still a good bit about and, yeah, some praiseworthy efforts at restoration and preservation. But I’ve seen some sad losses in Geelong and I watching with trepidation every time I see a planning notice on the front fence of any old house in Geelong.

The Dell and The Priory mysteriously disappeared when the adjoining Ariston House was earmarked as a childcare centre. North Geelong Primary, learning centre of so any post-war migrants, almost disappeared to arson. Deakin Uni’s social housing museum of historic regional buildings was put to bed by none other than the uni that oversaw its creation.

Waverley House was knocked down to make way for the waterfront’s Crowne Plaza complex, with gormless CFMEU vandals hosing National Trust protesters for their temerity. Jack Mundey should have been cartwheeling in his grave.

Two lovely between-the-war homes next to The Palais gave up the ghost without a whisper. Now a heritage car park. An ancient forgotten chapel behind the old Aberdeen Chateau near my place was smartly demolished in front of me one Saturday morning without ceremony or recognition.

The CBD has long hosted vacant buildings left to rot in their footings. Buildings that can’t be knocked down but which also can’t be rebuilt, or renovated so they might be repurposed. I’ve also seen owners refuse to repair their properties.

I kind of like the idea of owners who deliberately destroy heritage buildings being forced surrender the land’s title. But I’ll admit it’s a bit heavy, there’s no doubt maintenance costs are real and not everyone can afford them. And that you’re unlikely to be able to readily sell such a property, making compulsory acquisition maybe not such a bad idea.

I do spy an irony in the architectural landmark that is the Geelong Heritage Centre, contrasting the fact so much of Geelong’s architectural heritage has vanished.

Similarly, in comparisons drawn between the heritage Dennys Lascelles Bow Truss Building on the site of the present-day TAC HQ and the heritage Breakwater aqueduct Barwon Water wants to bring down.

The former was demolished by the State Government in its own heritage advice, not to mention World Heritage condemnation. Now a government water utility wants to do the same to the aqueduct, renowned for its magnificent bowstring design akin to Scotland’s famed Firth of Forth bridge.

The move is driven by concerns about its deteriorating concrete collapsing and presumably some attendant legal liability, even if ducks are probably the only denizens of the underlying swampland likely to be injured in any such instance.

I can’t help but wonder if demolition crews might not encounter the same significant difficulties they did when trying to wreck the Bow Truss building. And yet it was purportedly in danger of imminent collapse.

Just like the aqueduct was 30 years ago, when a report for Barwon Water said the structure could collapse at any time. Funny, it’s still there. Fancy that, the ducks must be getting nervous.

Parmi punters prey in global gastro war

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So the Aussie national dish, our most popular culinary go-to, is pretty much the chicken parmi.

Been that way for a while, of course, though I’m not quite sure just how it superseded the old dog’s eye and dead horse, and barbie snags and roast lamb, let alone Vegemite on toast and Chinese fried rice, but there you have it.

Look through any pub kitchen’s order list and the chicken parmi’s first cab off the rank with the punters … steaks, battered fish and chips, sliders and spag bol and marinara all lengthy place-getters in the race.

Parmi nights are de rigueur in many pubs, often pipping trivia nights, happy hours, burger nights and half-price cocktail sessions.

But it seems keeping parmi patrons happy is still a bit of a tricky business. Which is probably why you’ll find chicken parmi morphing to meet the market.

Actually, it’s more than morphing. More like transmogrifying, if you can do that to a battered chicken.

That’s transmogrify, transitive verb: to change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect.

Yeah, strange, grotesque, bizarre. That’s about the only way you can describe the menu I tripped over up the bush this week.

It hosted no less than 18 different chicken parmi toppings. And two types of chicken, grilled and crumbed, plus crumbed eggplant if you didn’t fancy chicken at all.

All very cosmopolitan, multicultural: Napoli, Hawaiian, Italian, Mexican, Greek, French and Moroccan. Even Australia if you like barbecue sauce, bacon, onion, egg and mozzarella cheese, which was Italian last time I looked.

And diverse too: meat lovers, spice of life, pumpkin, carbonara, pepper, gravy, mushroom, garlic butter, creamy Dijon and seafood for the piscatorially-inclined.

Amid all these you’re talking jalapenos, chilli flakes, hummus, dukka, chorizo, pineapple, feta, goats cheese, corn chips, sour cream, ras el hanout, salsa, olives … and kilos of mozzarella.

In short, the humble chicken parmi is quietly assuming the role played for the past five decades by that evergreen European migrant, the pizza.

The pizza, of course, has already been through the mill, assuming every global gastronomic possibility to the point my favourite has morphed from Napoletana and pepperoni to the more-catholic quattro-gusti four-quarter job.

And the favourite of the four, what else? Satay chicken.

Yeah, sacrilege I know but perhaps not as bad as my effort at the bush pub parmi jamboree.

Sick to death of chicken, I ordered the scotch fillet.

“No probs mate – how do you like it?”

“Medium’ll be fine, mate.”

Then I was taken aback.

“Which topping do you want?”

“Topping? Like all the parmis? Gees, you’ve got ’em from everywhere.”

“Yair.”

I quickly eyed the menu again.

“You don’t have satay sauce by any chance?”

I already knew the answer. This was northern Vic, after all, not Bali or Thailand or Malaysia.

“Sorry, I can ask the chef.”

“Naah, don’t fuss, I’ll go the mushies. They’re not from Leongatha by any chance, are they?”

Fair to say I’m still smarting from the glare that attracted.

History-mystery repeats itself

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The Vanishing Place, by Zoe Rankin, Hachette

Okay, you emerge from the deep bush of New Zealand as a young girl after fleeing a mad/bad, abusive/loving dad who kept you, your siblings and your mum apart from the world.

Mum’s dead, dad’s clean off his rocker, a serious and paranoid boozehound killing blokes with shovels, so it’s get out of Dodge time, even if your siblings won’t follow.

Locals are flummoxed by your wild child nature, authorities never get a handle on anything and a new isolation, bar one or two tight friends, and haunting memories and grief, make life a painful, stressful daily travail.

Fast forward some 17 years and our protagonist, Effie, has long fled the Long White Cloud for Scotland when she’s petitioned back home by the policeman boyfriend she was forced to leave behind. The magnet is dynamic, she can’t resist.

There’s a curious job to investigate and he needs a very singular hand; an eight-year-old red-headed girl has just emerged from the wilderness, collapsing half-starved in a shop, with blood all over her hands.

She’s clearly traumatised. Won’t talk. Says her name, Anya, then slams the door shut. Shrieks at anyone trying to talk to her, attacks them tooth and nail.

Chillingly, she’s also the dead spit of Effie when she wandered out of the bush, red hair, green eyes.

History-mystery is repeating itself, with a poisonous unavoidable question: is her father still out?

Faced again with everything she’d tried to escape, the isolation and fear enforced by damaged parents, Effie is the only one who can get through to Anya, but it’s an agonising task, for both: one terrified, religious mania-like, of her new surroundings; the other of revisiting her horrific past – as well as her painful lost love.

Author Rankin employs a rapid-fire, present-past-present-past technique to relate the two stories. It’s a somewhat infuriating mechanism running two tales in tandem but it’s effective in maintaining a tense and compelling narrative. Mercifully, the to-and-fro annoyance is abated by short, sharp and fast-moving chapters.

That aside, Rankin delivers a harrowing account of murder and mayhem as police raid the bush home the still-mute Anya escaped. And as Effie, unconvinced by the all-too-neat findings of the police, inevitably and foolishly returns to the wilderness with Anya to find an unexpected, and very nasty, small but deadly cult. But no so sign of her father.

Things turn very pear-shaped when she’s predictably trapped, chained, starved, humiliated and menaced with a misogynistic religious zealotry. Effie’s outlook is even bleaker when Anya reappears beside one of the cult’s monsters to chastise her and order her to repent for not fulfilling a biblical female submission to men.

That’s enough spoilers for one review. Rest assured, sufficient twists and turns exist to make the book one that will keep you reading well into the night. You might find daytime just that little bit more comfortable.

Little art of murder

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Odd, the things that can come your way unexpectedly. A late aunt some years ago presented me a large envelope of unusual sketches and prints.

A swag of etchings and proofs of rural scenes in New South Wales. All rustic radiance, bucolic beauty and pastoral pulchritude if I can labour the alliterative allusions.

Lots of landscapes, mountains, eucalypts, post-and-rail fences, barns, stables, slab huts and farm buildings, cattle, horses, bushmen, timber bridges, bush tracks, gullies, rivers, creeks … a fair old Cook’s Tour of the Aussie bush, in fact.

Many of them depict scenes in and around the Burragorang Valley west of Sydney, where their artist, David Little, lived in the 1940s. Fair way, in the day, from Werribee where my grandfather, who supplied him with hard-to-source paper back in the wartime years, lived. Lot of the valley’s now underwater, flooded for Sydney’s Warragamba Dam in the 1950s.

David Little came out of Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat’s St Pat’s, same as my grandad, Leo Bartels. Both were born in 1893.  Little’s old man, also a David, was a rate collector, hydraulic engineer and secretary across various local councils, Romsey, Bacchus Marsh, Melton and Werribee.

 

He lived in a Wattle Ave heritage home in Werribee I visited years later, as a kid, to hang out with a young schoolmate. By then, a scrap metal collection , with impressive aircraft fuselages and car bodies, had amassed at the rear of the property. A few years later, I recall 21st birthday and bucks turn parties.

Little the younger pursued a career in electrical engineering, earned himself a pilot’s licence in 1918, joined the Australian Flying Corps at age 25 and headed off to war only to have the Armistice signed while he was in transit. Took him a year to get home again whereon he settled in Sydney as a telephone engineer.

   

He’s listed on the Bacchus Marsh & District Roll of Honour and has a tree planted in his name in the town’s famed Avenue of Honour, not far from the old Woolpack Inn, one-time watering hole of the notorious bushranger Captain Moonlight with whom I share an odd connection (https://noelmurphy.com.au/portfolio-item/im-being-followed-by-a-moonlite-shadow/).

Little took off to the US and Canada in the 1920s, details are sketchy, returned to NSW where he married and moved about a bit – Armidale, Bondi, Burragorang and Avalon in a luxuriously furnished cottage among gum trees on a hill overlooking Pittwater. He worked in the public service and developed skills as a successful artist.

 

He suffered a nervous breakdown and while his artworks fetched  impressive figures, one painting as much as 200 pounds in 1951, he described himself as an invalid pensioner. Well-educated, qualified and read – he was friends with the poet Paul Grano  – his preferred art medium was oil but he produced a significant number of etchings as well.

A letter from my grandfather to Little, now in the University of Queensland’s Grano Collection, discusses everything from his paper supplies to Shakespeare, Grano himself – who was a St Pat’s old boy – and the nuns at Geelong’s Sacred Heart College, where my mother and her sisters boarded.

 

In his late 50s, however, Little’s life unravelled horrifically. He went to various doctors, including a Macquarie Street specialist, for mental problems. His wife, Ada, was diagnosed with a cancer which treatment was unable to contain. Her problems, however, deteriorated in catastrophic fashion.

As The Daily Telegraph reported on 19 August 1951:

“Detectives late yesterday charged a Sydney artist with having murdered his wife. They allege he killed her in their luxuriously furnished home at Taylor’s Point, Avalon.

“The dead woman was Mrs Ada Adeline Little, 52. David Little; 58, appeared at Manly Court, and was remanded until August 27.

“Detectives found Mrs Little’s body, battered about the head, in the living-room of her home.

“Little and his wife, who were childless, lived in a three-roomed cottage in Wandeen Road.

“The cottage, set amid high gum trees on a hill, overlooks Pittwater.

“Little, a successful portrait painter, bought the cottage six weeks ago.

“Neighbors said Mrs Little had a growth. They said that recent treatment had failed to stop the spread of the growth

“Early yesterday they saw Mrs Little collect the morning paper from the delivery van at the front of the cottage.

“About three hours later they saw a man leave the cottage and run down the road.

“Detective-Sergeant A. Garlick (Manly) found Mrs Little’s body.

“Dr H. Sanders, the local government medical officer, found Mrs Little had died from head and brain injuries about 8am.

“Many oil paintings were hung on the walls of the living room where the body was found. Most of the paintings were signed ‘David Little’. In the studio police found a half -finished portrait of an elderly woman.

“Neighbours said Little last week told them he had sold a painting in Avalon for £200.

“They told police that the Littles were a quiet couple.

“Little, grey-haired and stooped, appeared in Manly Court wearing a khaki wind jacket, grey trousers, and blue shirt.”

Three weeks later, Little was committed to stand trial for murder after the Coroner found Ada died from injuries feloniously and maliciously inflicted by her husband. Details that emerged in the coronial inquiry, as reported in the broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald, were class-A tabloid fodder.

“Francis Blackwell, retired, of Hudson’s Parade, Taylor’s Point, said that at 9.15 a.m. on August 18 he saw Little standing at the entrance of his (Blackwell’s) drive.

“Little, he stated, said to him: ‘Will you drive me to Newport, please? I have murdered my wife’.

“Blackwell said he led Little to a grass embankment near his house. Little appeared agitated and when questioned by Blackwell on the murder said: ‘I hit her with a mallet — I did it in cold blood’.

“At this stage, Blackwell said, Little was in a ‘terrible way and pulling up grass and muttering’. 

“Little said to him: ‘They will hang me for this’.

“Detective-Sergeant Allen Garlick, of Manly police, said Little told him later that day that he had killed his wife and was prepared to take the consequences.

“Detective Garlick said he asked why he had killed his wife, and Little replied: ‘Well, it is a long story. A certain situation had built up in my mind concerning my wife and myself and something had to be done about it.

” ‘I had my breakfast. I got a mallet and I hit her four or five times on the head and killed her’. “

Little was duly sentenced to life imprisonment but on October 10 was taken from Long Bay Prison to Parramatta Mental Hospital where he died of natural causes on 29 November 1951.

David Little and his one-time Burragorang home before being flooded.

Truth, reality and other fictions

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Hard to watch, hear or read anything of politics without thinking of the razor-sharp wisdom peppered through TV’s Yes Minister.

“Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied’.”

“I don’t think we need to bring the truth in at this stage.”

Sir Humphrey, Bernard and Jim Hacker possessed an unerring ability to confuse and manipulate issues, generally to a point of ‘creative inertia’ protecting their behinds.

Timely to remember because in these days of mass disinformation, misinformation, fake news, AI, hate speech and free speech/outright lies, there’s more obfuscation than ever.

So much so that facts, to many people, don’t really matter. As George Constanza says: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

Your truth can be the truth – even if you don’t believe it, I’d submit. And it might be nearing its use-by date but, to some, facts and reality are still important.

A couple of recent instances where they went on sick leave:

  • Albo versus Chief of the Defence Force David Johnston over exactly just when Australia discovered China’s live-fire war games. Truth seems MIA.
  • RBA cuts interest rates because inflation’s dropping, prompting immediate inflation-triggering election pork-barrelling. Was it asleep at the wheel or pushed into it following the government’s recent RBA restructure? MIA.
  • Nazi-saluting drongos arrested while others demanding total annihilation of the Jewish nation in weekly demos shrieking vitriolic, murderous hate speech are fine. Guess the drongos aren’t Muslim voters in western Sydney seats. Sieg-hail.
  • Trump v Europe, Ukraine, Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world. His ambit deal pitches are always wild. He rolled over to Mexico, Canada. Ukraine might still come around if Vance and POTUS can cool their hyper-extended jets. Trump’s  cooled his Gaza Riviera plans. You have to call BS on him.

In fact, facts can be very illusory.

If you really think the US will come save your bacon when things get tough, think again – and Trump’s hardly the first Yank slow out of the stalls. The US were very tardy to help the Allies in two world wars.

The first saw massive shipments of US supplies and a huge line of credit to the Allies before they finally joined the fray mid-1917.

And prior to the Pearl Harbor trigger, late 1941, US industrialists were actively helping the Nazis: Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, GE tungsten carbide with Krupps, Ford and GM with vehicles, Coca-Cola, ITT with phones ….

It is the biggest capitalist nation on earth, after all. It’ll probably come if there’s a buck in it somewhere. Why would y’all think otherwise?

So yeah, worry about these new forms of falsehood but don’t overlook your own illusions of truth. That’s confirmation bias btw. It’s not new, been around forever.

Thing about truth, it doesn’t really bend. You can try but it’s really like maths, chemistry, biology. And no matter how you dress it up, it can often feel like a fair punch in the nose.

Am I getting too cynical? Maybe, but as Sir Humphrey tells me: “A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.”

Van Walker: Healing Descent

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God awful how so many musicians were chewed up and spat out by Covid and its merciless lockdowns and frightening threats. No quarter for them in that scrap.

Curious that some said the pandemic allowed them to collaborate with their muses, to plumb their creativity. Don’t know that many actually did.

The yoke of raw subsistence living eroded a lot of artistic energy. The inequity of jobless mainstream workers receiving lucrative handouts unavailable to creatives was a sharp and bitter rejection of their import. It left many of them stranded and more vulnerable than ever.

Vandemonian musician Van Walker, however, while belted about as much as anyone, was one bloke whose artistry, individuality and fascination with the under-currents buoying the human condition soared rather than floundered in that virulent netherworld.

It was an enormously productive period for him. And for a singer-composer who regularly tips songwriting norms on their ear, it was an especially innovative era. Given the universal futility and frustration of Covid, why wouldn’t you go out on a limb? Why not break a few while you’re at it?

The outcome of Van Walker’s efforts is a bit of everything that’s intriguing about songwriting: by turns, it’s stuff that’s poetic and melodic, insightful, biting and energetic, introspective and uplifting, even supernatural and transcendental.

Healing Descent, the seventh album to date in his lengthy career, features the best of all these in a kaleidoscope of inspired verses, great hooks and a few sharp turns into unexpected vales dappled with flashes of brilliance and colour. Yeah, big call but go have a listen for yourself, you’ll soon see.

The Green Man, and Underworld queen Persephone

Much of it is delivered with the deeply moody steel guitar work of Walker’s Canadian mate Chris Altmann which, combined with Walker’s acoustic handiwork – along with violin and cello strings, banjo, didgeridoo, accordion, percussion and some superb Tele chicken-picking from a raft of musicians – makes for a clever and varied musical travelogue.

What’s curious here is where the lockdown of spring 2020 found Van Walker’s grey matter. It was a time when people were anxiously waiting for a vaccine, an antidote, herd immunity, any kind of relief to the death and darkness Covid was serving up daily.

Walker’s Healing Descent tackles the uncertainty and hopes attendant to these emotions through a prism of mythology, classicism, poetic scrutiny, catharsis and, ultimately, an over-arching optimism. As he writes:

“When the west winds are raging at your door,

“And rain is like the ocean’s roar,

Don’t go dreaming about better times or to climb,

“You must go down every time.”

Down to where the fountainhead of self is found, is what he’s saying. The vehicles with which he navigates this descent, and its flipside ascent, include the seasons and their early ties with humans, with among others, pagans and ancient Greeks.

Persephone’s Return references the kidnapped queen of the underworld and daughter of Demeter, goddess of the earth and the harvest, tipping a hat to the “subtle yet rock-steady power of nature”.

Summer Thunder, Winter’s Last Words and Hades’ Lullaby pay similar homage to the seasons and their nature, while at times also referencing poignant relationship vicissitudes.

Pan, Arcadia, primordial ancient energies, nature’s soothe and violence, spirits within the trees and rivers and streams – all dovetail into Walker’s healing balm. None moreso, perhaps, than his Green Man, for the pagan symbol of rebirth and nature’s largely patient but absolute rule.

This figure doubles as a metaphor for the artists and creatives underscoring and protecting our humanity. Walker’s efforts in this regard shouldn’t go unacknowledged. You’ll find a lot of Jung, Thomas and Baudelaire behind his ruminations.

Starseed and the cover of Healing Descent.

In many ways, Walker’s one of his own Starseeds; cue his own words, “People who believe they were born on other planets, strangers from a strange land, etc, who have fallen to this blue planet perhaps to save this world while the illuminati lizard aliens run the show herding all the sheeple up for apocalyptic dinner”.

He continues: “Too much time online will make anyone feel alien. It’s what the media and powers-that-be endeavour to do: alienate us from ourselves and each other, driving a wedge between the super-wealthy and the common people before they sell us all as mere scapegoats.

“LGBTQ scapegoats, woke scapegoats, refugee scapegoats, homeless scapegoats … all the powerless and vulnerable groups, starting us fighting each other instead of them, while they continue to haul in unheard-of profits.

“We need to get our eyes back on the ball and off the identity issues. Inequality and injustice are rife. Housing unaffordable. Wages frozen. Prices through the roof. Forget the aliens and lizard kings and address this reality or get ready for the jackboots.”

If he’s starting to sound a little sharp, take a listen to Altmann’s rockabilly Telecaster kicking arse as well. Healing requires care and soothing remedies but sometimes it takes just that bit of a kick in the clacker. And Starseed Homesick Blues is just about the perfect prescription for that.

Healing Descent is available at https://cheersquadrecordstapes.bandcamp.com/…/healing…

Life’s a Surf Coast beach and then some

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Summer’s here and it’s time to get your beach on. Whether it’s the thumping, cranking, millpond smooth, rugged cliff-faced or idyllically picturesque beach that takes your fancy, Surf Coast, Bellarine and Geelong beaches have you covered. Admirably.

While they’re in hot demand for sun-lovers, surfers, sandcastles and swimmers, for paddlers and paragliders, indeed for all manner of beach-bums, there’s also a secret life to our beaches that slips under the radar for the many visitors flooding into town. And for many locals, too.

These are stories and marvels that live quietly alongside the wind-sculpted dunes, sea-carved ochre cliffs, the sandy rocky coast and grey-green eucalypts that line the watery expanses of Bass Strait and Port Phillip Bay. Prick your ears, spread your wings a little, and you might just hear them whispering through the mists of time as you comb the beaches, sprawl yourself on the sand or take in the clouds overhead as you float offshore on your back.

Maybe the ghosts of the “yellow men” who left an oar behind at Point Lonsdale long before the days of Buckley, according to Aborigines. Or the mysterious skull found in the water at Queenscliff, and now in its museum, or tales of old Kerosene Jack wearing a tattooed map of Benito’s Treasure on his butt.

Shipwreck horrors and courage abound, the Barwon Heads pub hosted terrorists plotting the destruction of the MCG, Apollo Bay has its terrorist hermit Nobby Hill and fishermen stories of peculiar things in the sky before Freddie Valentich went missing to a purported flying saucer. Not to mention the palaeontological marvel of Dinosaur Cove.

Anglesea hosts swags of metaphysical blue vivianite, Cumberland River has geological architecture to die for and Fairhaven a terrifying shark encounter lifesavers almost died for. At 13th Beach you’ll find tales of a sunken shipwreck that lured politicians into illegal dives, whale carcasses too. At Breamlea a shipwrecked rhinoceros, more whale cases at Point Addis, nudists too, and mysterious underground bunkers dug out along the foreshore at Torquay.

Yet another whale carcass, a 70-tonne blue whale at Cathedral Rock, held up traffic on the Great Ocean Road as cranes and trucks relocated her to the sewerage farm at Werribee to properly decompose before her bones were treated and placed in the foyer of the Melbourne Museum. People still talk of the pong.

The Lorne main beach nearby once hosted the biplanes of early aviators while quicksand claimed pioneering youngsters and shipwreck salvage divers drank their own urine in the local pubs to prove their toughness. The glory days of the town’s The Arab coffee lounge live large in the hearts of locals and visitors alike. Glory-day surfing yarns, many unpublishable, are a buck a bag the full length of the coast.

TV’s Seachange and Round the Twist live on in the minds and imaginations of Barwon Heads, St Leonards and Aireys Inlet visitors, the charming Oddball flick’s penguin rescue to more again if you drift west of the Twelve Apostles down to Warrnambool.

Back around Geelong and the Bellarine, you’ll find everything from bayside tightrope walkers and wartime bathing beauty contests to helicopter crashes, 16th century Portuguese explorers and Limeburner Point’s Geelong Keys, Siberian migratory birds, piers on fire, ships shot and sunk in Corio Bay, and strange rock art only properly visible from the air.

While the beaches hold a wealth of folklore, the southwest hinterland holds a similar trove of mystery, myth and magic for the curious-minded visitor – everything from volcanoes and megafauna to secret wartime airbases and bunyips. Think floating islands, giant ferns, spotted tiger quolls, exquisite waterfalls, pre-settlement tales of sealers and Aborigines, attacks on Aborigines and you’re in the ballpark.

You’ll find subterranean gurglings beneath the Stony Rises, ancient megafauna trails across the plains, carnivorous snails hidden deep in the Otways, rain gauge crater lakes at Red Rock. It’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not territory.

Hard to beat the bunyip scare of the 1840s bunyip scare, though, after a so-called giant bunyip bone was found at Timboon. Identified by a local Aborigine, who attested to vicious family run-ins with the cryptozoological beast, the bone set off a public hysteria epidemic with people afraid to leave their homes at night for weeks on end.

Matters weren’t helped any by reports of livestock mauled by unknown causes on properties from Lara to Barwon Heads. The bone disappeared over time but is suspected of belonging to a diprotodon, a pre-Ice Age rhino-sized wombat from the region’s megafauna catalogue.

Long gone now, like the Mahogany Ship somewhere under the sand dunes down past Warrnambool. Throw yourself down an interweb rabbit-hole while you’re soaking up the rays on a Surf Coast beach and see what that turns up. Portuguese caravels, secret maps, international politics, strange visitors to Corio Bay in the 1520s and more.

Might be time to stop, though, when you hit the New York art exhibition of a few years back featuring a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child – and an Australian cockatoo – revving up the pre-Cook Euro arrival possibilities.

After all, that water’s calling and it won’t be warm all year.

Flying kangaroos loose in the top paddock

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Couldn’t help being reminded of Maynard G. Krebs, the hapless beatnik from the Dobie Gillis Show years back, when I saw our Albo losing it in a Johannes Leak Qantas upgrade cartoon.

If you remember Maynard, he went to water at any mention of employment. “Work!” he’d shriek in a high-pitched panic.

In the Qantas cartoon, Jim Chalmers suggests a need “to shift the focus back to the economy”. Albo erupts in similar shivering, sweating, white-knuckled, wide-eyed fear, squeaking: “Economy??!”

You might better recall Maynard as the castaway Gilligan, who seems another appropriate doppelganger for someone lurching haplessly from one disaster to another and yet staying afloat if adrift.

But the many questions about Airbus Albo’s closeness to former CEO Joyce and Qantas’ favoured treatment when Qatar came knocking with new flights and offers for Aussie customers are only part of the issue.

Think also MP upgrades, Qantas selling a million flight tickets to flights that didn’t exist, Joyce’s remuneration and bonus payments, oversight by the Qantas board – which included consumer guru Todd Sampson – deplorable treatment of passengers whose flights are cancelled, generally atrocious in-flight service …

People are going on about Dutton on Rinehart flights, but he wasn’t the one keeping Qatar out of our airways.

It’s not just Qantas and its Jetstar that the Feds are letting let us down. Returned from OS last week on Branson’s Virgin, who I’ve swung across to out of fear of being stranded somewhere noxious by the flying kangaroo.

Not much better. Check-ins are a long and lengthy farce, automated or in person. Seating space is ridiculous, painful and outrageous. In-house comms don’t work and the “hope you enjoy flight” nonsense over the PA is pure insult to injury.

These flights clearly don’t need to meet anything like the health or disability regulations demanded of any other structure accommodating human beings.

Passengers are blithely told the two toilets servicing some 160 people can’t be used while stewards spend an hour doling out drinks and over-priced food you wouldn’t feed your dog.

The 12 or so happy upgraded Albos in business, meantime, have one all to themselves. Nice ride if you can wangle it.

Not so nice when, like my last trip, the two cattle-class johns are commandeered by two gastro-infected squatters who refuse to give up their tenancy. Twenty cross-legged people in the aisles squirming and moaning did nothing to convince them otherwise.

Mercifully, those in the holding pattern didn’t succumb to the same diarrhoea or vomiting. Bowels like Grenadier Guards, though, shouldn’t need to be a necessity on everyday flights.

Not that Virgin, Qantas, Jetstar or anyone in CASA seem to share this thought on what is surely a matter of basic human rights.

Funny thing, Bonza used to serve up drinks and meals to your seat individually. None of this hijacking the road to the dunny nonsense Albo and our MPs obviously think is below their station. That indiscretion didn’t last.

Nor did poor old Rex, which went belly-up for having the temerity to try cutting into Qantas’ miserable bailiwick. Seems that’s what happens when you get too close to a protected species – or in Airbus Albo’s case, an endangered species.

Speaking of different species, Virgin is looking to let pet animals on board next year. I suspect that’ll only end in tears, or howling, yelping, baying-at-the-moon mutts on a plane.

Hold on to your seats, and your noses, because they won’t worry about waiting for the dunny line to clear. It won’t be the only thing that stinks about our airlines.

 

Bushwhacked by the jungle … again

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Nothing quite like throwing yourself to the not-so-gentle vicissitudes of jungle-bashing. Never any shortage of geography, critters, climes or circumstances waiting to assail you.

The Amazon’s a nice place to start, not that I’m any kind of authority on these things. Its bushmasters, jaguars, fire-ants and piranha and non-stop rain thrumming from the dripping condensation of millions of leaves should spark your imagination. And any phobias you might  have about stings, bites, tropical diseases or being eaten alive.

Of course, you can wrangle with tigers and pythons and bugs the size of plates in the dense forests of India. Or perhaps the lion, leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena predators of the deepest darkest Congo, if you’re an Afrique tragic.

Not this armchair explorer, though. Much prefer my Spot out in his backyard kennel.

I do, however, occasionally venture into the jungle, those species of jungle that aren’t a million miles from civilisation at any rate.

I’m happy to explore their waterfalls and beaches and rivers and gorges and the like. I’m big on old jungle temples. But I’d much rather avian squawkers and howler monkeys ahead of apex predators yet to understand their place in the planet’s food chain.

Matter of fact, one of the best sounds you’ll hear is the cry from a jungle bar, a shout to be precise. Nothing quite so inviting, especially when it’s attached to a pisco sour in Peru, an icy Antarctica pilsener under Morro Dois Irmaos or a chilly Bintang in Ubud.

A recent sojourn to Bali’s Gianyar regency found me scuttling down a precipitous track to revisit the famed Tegenungan Waterfall. Great way to cultivate a thirst.

 

By no means off the beaten track these days, it’s still a jungle favourite. Cliffs chiselled like something from Fred and Barney’s Bedrock, impenetrable jungle foliage, blazing sun and a stunning cascade crashing onto the heads of fools splashing about a hundred feet below. It’s a jaw-dropper.

I was taken aback, however, to realise this erstwhile primitive attraction – one of decidedly shonky stairs, rusty handrails, slippery muddy tracks and dodgy bamboo footbridges – had been concreted over, updated, usurped and pitched headlong over a cliff into the A-level rankings of knockout tourist traps.

Lord help me, even a massive, brand spanking, glass-bottomed 199-metre suspension bridge soars over the entire precinct, connecting two villages separated by the Petanu River gorge 66 metres below. The Bali Glass Bridge.

Never seen anything like it.  Yet right next door, the Omma Day Club, designed by bamboo magicians Studio 3 Bali, is giving it a fair run for its rupiah.

Perched impossibly on the edge of a cliff punctuated by smaller waterfalls, Omma is an architectural cacophony of said bamboo, thatch, outrageous mosaic tiles, swimming pools, restaurants, cafes and lounges.

It’s somewhere between George of the Jungle tree-hut, Gilligan’s Island and Pablo Luna with its mathematical hyperbolic twists and turns. Its outlook is eye-watering. and, thankfully, nowhere as vertigo-inducing as the bridge.

Tellingly, it’s an important refreshment station as you gird your loins for the exhausting, dehydrating climb back up those precipitous million or so steps. But gloriously, as a doe-eyed angel behind the jump told me, it also hosts an elevator back to the top.

Whaaat?! Of course it does. How else do the staff and everything else come and go? Brain fade moment. Curse this damn heat. Edgar Rice Burroughs never really mentioned that in the Tarzan comics and novels I was raised on.

Tell you what, though, for sheer feverish jungle intrigue you can’t go past the Boeing 737 I discovered deep in the Ubud suburb of Penestanan below the Svargo Loka Hotel.

 

Yep, giant bloody airplane surrounded a river gorge, a rocky redoubt, coconut trees and palms, and any number of monkeys, chinchilla squirrels and spa healing tragics you can imagine.

And it’s loud. Emblazoned with giant tailplane images, and fuselage wording, of none other than the uber-capitalists Warren Buffett and Milton Friedman. Straight out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

You can’t see the thing from basically anywhere except the hotel property it’s on: Villa Biyu Siyu. It comes up, however, like a priapic Roman brothel sign on Google Earth.

Coincidentally, ridiculously, the hotel room and pool I’m polluting just happens to be directly opposite this plane, across the gorgeous Tjampuhan River gorge. I can see part of tailplane through the trees a hundred metres away. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was, to mangle logic and language.

It’s further evidence the universe is dragging me into the jungle towards those rock apes my forebears descended from several generations ago. But tracking the plane’s provenance down is proving tricky.

No-one was around with enough English to quiz when I visited Biyu Siyu. No marketing spiels or blurbs or web ads offer any clues. Pretty pictures around, sure – you can find some sharp drone footage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDj3Sznd9-E&t=15s – but these websites offer next to nothing about the whys or wherefores of the plane’s presence in an impossible location.

Neighbouring locals are no help, repeat no help. They don’t even know it’s there, and that includes staff of two popular hotels less than 100 metres away. Fortunately, I had a surveyor with similar jungle fixations to me on hand. He discovered the thing in the first place, on Google Earth, so we knew where it was, we just couldn’t get there.

Upper food-chain apex predators that we fancied ourselves, a couple of hurdled fences and gates and it didn’t take too long. Shove over Tarzan Greystoke, we’re the lords of the jungle now.

A dying art at Warrock

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Art takes a never-ending variety of guises. Given the number of artists extolled for their drafting skills, it seems only reasonable that good drafting might itself be considered a legitimate art form.

This is especially so when, as in so many artistic representations, a tale of some note accompanies the work. It is even more important given that it is a dying skill, one that has been slowly but surely replaced by the cyber skills of computer assisted drafting.

Take the measured drawings of the Warrock farming station north of Casterton overseen by Geelong architect and former Deakin University lecturer Lorraine Huddle.

The striking plans, elevations and sections prepared by 100 Deakin fourth-year architecture students for this project, undertaken in the early 1990s, presently live within the Special Collection of the Deakin woolstores campus library.

All up, there are some 230 drawings of the past settlement’s belfry, bull shed, homestead, shearing shed, shearers quarters, lavatories and much more. The drawings were worth an estimated $300,000 some 20 years ago, and were used by Heritage Victoria to assist in the station’s restoration.

 

The wider Warrock collection at Deakin includes monographs, maps, music, ephemera and pamphlets. However, it is the drawings that really strike the observer. Most are rendered in ink, some in pencil, and display inordinate details which at times extend as far as nail holes in timber weatherboards and often individual bricks.

The measured drawings were used for the restoration of dozens of buildings on the property, a Western District pastoral station about 30 km north of Casterton built by Scottish cabinet-maker George Robertson from the 1840s onwards.

It is considered Victoria’s, perhaps Australia’s, most important collection of farm buildings and includes 57 structures mostly built of sawn timber.

The complex sprawls across a gently rolling parkland of ancient river redgums with its grainstore, dairy, bacon house, blacksmith shop, bullock byre, branding shed and numerous other buildings reflecting the life of an isolated sheep station where all the necessary essential to life and such circumstances had to be grown or stored for long periods.

Other buildings in the complex include a pigsty, privies, stable, kennel, hayshed and hay barn, branding shed, foot dip, slaughterhouse, skin shed, cow bail, duck run, coach house and a cottage.

“Some of the buildings are just marvellous, they’re gorgeous,” said Huddle. “Also, it’s a dying art. All the Warrock drawings were done by hand. The students were very, very keen. The place got them in. There was no electricity there, only in the main house and a little cottage.

“One night I went walking about 10.30 and saw some lights in the conservatory. Students had placed candles in the dirt of a garden bed and were working on the drawings. That’s how keen they were.”

Huddle says George Robertson’s cabinet-making skills were reflected in the detail of numerous buildings at the station.

“You can also see his strong Protestant work ethic expressed in these buildings,” she says. “The bell tower, for instance, looks like a little chapel but it’s just a bell to call people to work.

“Time management was a pretty important part of that work ethic and while Robertson worked hard all the time, he treated his workers very well. He gave them good accommodation and looked after them a lot – but he expected them to work hard too.”

The original version of this article was published in the Geelong Advertiser 18 March 2001.