Africa: It’s a jungle out there, Nkosi

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Exorcisms, terrorist killings, people smuggling, illegal disposal of bodies, bigamy – a priest’s work in war-ravaged Rhodesia was never easy.

But Irish Anglican Fr Michael Gale is a practical preacher. It’s a handy talent when you’re sharing your congregation’s allegiances with tribal rivalries, superstition and witch-doctors.

That’s not to mention a devil’s telephone of villager intrusion, a highly-vocal mothers choir interrupting Mass at will or police special branch poking its nose where it’s not wanted.

Or a patchwork of Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Dutch Reformed confreres all too keen to overrule his activities. And your name on a terror death-list, just to top things off.

But Fr Gale, Nkosi, has military backing – he’s a captain with a detachment of sappers – as he tries to oversee his two parishes: the excitable African St Augustine’s and white conservative St Cuthbert’s.

It’s a handy qualification, up to a point, but not much help while he’s racing mothers in labour to hospital – especially when his gun goes off accidentally in the car. Or trying to play Solomon with an injured father seeking to return to his remarried wife and sons.

As the local terrorist body count rises, Fr Gale also finds himself seeking to preserve community calm while awkwardly contradicted by his religious scruples. It’s all a rather tough ask, something a lesser man might find overwhelming.

But with the help of a secret stash of beloved coffee beans, single-malt whisky and vinous collaborations with sympathetic colonels and bishops, and more than a few solid parishioners, he manages to find a middle path.

Nkosi lies somewhere in that fertile ground between The Little World of Don Camillo and The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. McCall Smith meets Guareschi with a Hibernian turn distinctly its own.

Its gentle humour and warm humanity in the face of clashing politics, creed and culture are wonderfully negotiated by the clever FitzSimons; himself a magistrate, parish priest and army chaplain in the former Rhodesia.

These days he’s a research fellow with Federation University, an historian and musician with Sovereign Hill and an author. He has written several titles, including Two Fat Ladies and Hercules Tom and The Unfortunate Endeavours of Charles Henry Brown: Aeronaut 1827-1870.

FitzSimons says the story and characters of Nkosi are fictitious and wholly imaginary although certain public figures, agencies and events are true.

With credentials like his, you’ll just have to take his word for that.

NKOSI: An African Adventure
By Terence FitzSimons
Mirador Publishing

Freeride world champ Huber retires

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Torquay’s Freeride world champion skier Lorraine Huber has announced her retirement  from the Freeride World Tour
after eight seasons. The Freeride World Tour is an annually toured series of events in which the best freeride skiers and snowboarders
compete for individual event wins, as well as the overall title of World
Champion in their respective genders and disciplines.

“I’ve had eight intense and unforgettable years on the FWT and I am
very happy to end my competition career on such a high note,” Huber said.

During the past 2018 season, Huber dominated the fourth tour stop in
Fieberbrunn in Austria with a win, followed by a second place at the
Xtreme Verbier in Switzerland, the finals of the Freeride World Tour,
putting her in third place overall.

In 2017, Huber achieved her big dream of winning the World Champion title. She also became runner-up
champion in 2014. She was awarded Vorarlberg Sportswoman of the Year
2017 and received the Golden Medal of Achievement in Sport from her home
state of Vorarlberg, Austria.

“Lorraine Huber is one of the best female skiers we’ve seen on the
Tour, winning a World Title and demonstrating one of the strongest
characters and commitment to her sport,” said Nicolas Hale-Woods, CEO of the
Freeride World Tour.

“Lorraine has been a major actor in the sport’s progression, she has shared her passion, and
is now willing to pass on her experience to future generations, which is
fantastic. Thank you Lorraine!”

Although Huber is retiring from freeride competition, by no means does
this suggest retirement from professional skiing.

“I want to put all my energy into new projects now,” she said.

“It’s especially important to me to pass on my knowledge and experience in the sport of freeriding to future generations –
particularly to female skiers.

“To this end, I plan on expanding my women’s freeride camps in Lech am Arlberg. I will also be busy with
the production of ski film projects. My next big goal is to complete my master’s degree in mental strength coaching at the University of
Salzburg. This will enable me to coach athletes professionally in
reaching their full potential.”

FEATURE:

DAREDEVILS are a funny breed. Some are clearly adrenalin junkies bent on scaring the daylights out of themselves for the rush it brings. Others are more methodical, analytical, driven for the thrill but exercising more care.

Talk to, say, base jumpers and you’ll note a supreme kind of confidence but also a deadly serious attention to detail. One slip and the game’s over. No second chances there. Same goes for highwire artists, F1 drivers, stuntmen and pilots, divers, speleologists, rock climbers, commandoes … blink and you might find yourself dead.

Torquay ski superstar Lorraine Huber talks about an ‘avalanche moment’ that very nearly persuaded her to walk away from extreme skiing — better known these days as freeriding — where she last month ranked number one in the world.

That’s number one in the world at throwing yourself over a precipitous cliff — a breathtaking sport many consider the scariest in the world. Forget bungee jumping and parachuting, this is a white-knuckler without a net and every chance of exiting this world at any point on the course between go and whoa.   

When that sport, your career, is all about jumping off a mountain, it pays to know everything you can possibly know about what’s underneath you; the type of snow, where rocks are, the angle of the slope, what line you need to take. Judges agree and detract rather than add points for reckless manoeuvres.

But avalanches, for all the planning, awareness and calculated risk, are just plain terrifying. It’s not you throwing yourself at the mountain, it’s the mountain throwing itself at you. Lorraine is well aware of the threat and at times it’s nearly prompted her to walk away from the sport she helped pioneer in the Austrian alps and where she has dominated international competitions for more than a decade.

Raised on the snowfields of Austria, in Lech am Arlberg, the nearest ski lift was 100 metres from her front door, Lorraine Huber went to ski school instead of kindergarten. Then at age eight, she moved to Australia, and Torquay. She studied at Newtown’s Sacred Heart College and grew up by the sea, but managed to get in six or so weeks skiing back in Austria.

She’s been living in the mountain village she grew up in, Lech am Arlberg, since the end of 1998 after graduating from Sacred Heart. It’s her dad’s home town and her family goes back there 400 and more years. The house her ancestors used to live is now the heritage museum.

Proud as she is of that, her mother is from Torquay, where Lorraine lived from age eight  to 18, and it still feels more like home to her than anywhere else, she says. She’s maintained friendships with girlfriends from primary and secondary school alike.

But in Lech, back in 1998, her world was about to change again. As she phrases it:

“My skiing world was all about making perfect, rhythmical turns straight down the fall line in all types of snow conditions, scooping tracks and creating symmetrical patterns in the snow in the true, traditional Arlberg style. Then, in February 1998, something remarkable happened …”

Avalanche warnings had locked entry in and out of Lech and Lorraine found herself, with her ski instructor buddies, skiing fast, long turns and dropped cliffs for the first time.

“Of course I bailed every time, but in the heavy snow fall, it didn’t matter,” she says. “On the fourth day, the sun came out, and I was tearing it up with my mates, headed straight for the cliff we sessioned, launched it, stomped it, and then arced four long and fast turns down to the bottom of the slope.”

And that was it. She was hooked on freeskiing.

A few years later, urged on by her instructor mates, she entered her first big mountain freeride contest — the Red Bull Snowthrill in Slovenia — and took out first prize. She’s been a professional ever since. And last season, 2014, saw her pipped for the Freeride World Tour’s top spot, running second to fellow Arlberg skier Nadine Wallner  — a prodigious achievement in anyone’s book.

She’s also a coach for prestigious KJUS World  events and Kastle Adventure Tours, a fully-certified ski guide and a director of freeride camps. Her sponsors include KJUS and Kästle, together with Scott, Garmont and ABS Avalanche Airbag. Just to drop a few names.

In fact, tap Lorraine Huber into Google and you’ll find a tidy 130,000-plus pages detailing her career as a professional freeride skier. Videos, articles, photographs … there are mountains of maneouvres and airborne escapades she throws herself through that will raise the hair on the back of your neck.

But as you might expect with a dangerous sport, it hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way. In 2007, she received a nasty reminder when she ruptured her ACL and MCL in a bad crash.

She underwent a ligament graft transplant — using a part of her hamstring to replace the ruptured ACL, which turns into a ligament-like tissue. The MCL was able to be sewn back together.

“I did eight months of rehab in Australia before getting back on snow,” she recalls. “My rehab didn’t go so well because I always had pain behind my kneecap, which consequently prevented my wasted muscles in my right leg from redeveloping. Due to this, I developed tendinitis in my right patella which, unfortunately, has become chronic.”

Did she find a strength she didn’t know she had?

“Yes, absolutely. I don’t think it is anything unusual though and I believe most people would have done the same. If life deals you some hardships then you just get through it because you have to, one day at a time. What other alternative do you have, anyway? The natural thing for me was to focus on my rehab and getting better.”

More recently, Lorraine struck further injury problem but tenacity and resilience saw her through.

“The season before, I came closer than ever before to achieving my goal of becoming Freeride World Tour champion. After a crash at the finals in Verbier (Switzerland), I placed second overall behind Arlberg local Nadine Wallner, who showed nerves of steel with a solid run that placed her in second on the day, and first overall.

“I had tasted blood, however, and was super-motivated to keep training and improving. During my off-snow training, my main motivator was the overall title. My thoughts returned to that title often.

“Come December, I was at the top of my game, feeling physically and mentally stronger than ever and also excited about skiing on the new Kästle BMX skis I had helped to develop. Then, on 26 December, disaster struck.

“All day we had been skiing low angle, grassy slopes and were having a ball. Suddenly, while skiing in the Seekopf area in Zürs, I hit a rock hidden under 30cm of snow and came to a complete stop. I broke my ankle on impact.

“I can tell you, it bloody hurt. When I heard my doctor give me his diagnosis of five to six weeks rest, my world started crumbling around me.”

Lorraine went through a learning curve, realising she’d focussed too much on the overall title the previous season, instead of directing her focus from one event to the next, aiming to just ski her best at each competition.

But within five weeks, almost miraculously, she was back skiing the Freerider World Tour, free in her mind, and finishing seventh overall and qualifying for the FWT 2016 and finishing fourth.

This year, Lorraine’s drive, determination and steely resolve saw her at last grasp the Freerider World Tour number one mantle.

“What drives me to be a freerider?” she says.

“I want to live a passionate life. I want to live a life that’s full of passion and a strong life and freeriding allows me to do that.”

A Sand Archive

Engineering a sand blast from the past

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Last time I saw him was a little startling. Wes Anderson’s quirky The Grand Budapest Hotel had just finished, in the Village cinema, and his steady mellifluous voice came floating out of the blackness behind me.

“So, what did you think of that, Murphy?” he asked. Of course, there’s only ever one answer for Anderson movies. “Peculiar but terrific,” I muttered, or something to that effect.

The voice belonged to a one-time Country Road Boards engineer with a liking for tweed coats, English cars from the 1950s, pushbikes and just about everything about Geelong’s past.

He was a regular commentator/supporter on all sorts of articles I’d written about old stuff around Geelong.

One time he admonished me, gently, for writing a yarn about Geelong founding father Foster Fyans’ reputation as a sadistic flogging commandant at the Norfolk Island convict colony.

Another time he presented me with a print by colonial artist Wilbraham Liardet of Geelong’s waterfront and fledgling township in 1848. “Keep up the good work,” he told me. It’s on a wall in my living room.

Peter Alsop had a great love — and encyclopaedic knowledge — of engineering history, of bridges and tunnels, of hydraulics and floods and breakwaters, of architecture, heritage and music. He was a violinist with the Geelong Symphony and Geelong String orchestras, and several other ensembles.

Clever bloke all round. And a polite, engaging and encouraging bloke.

But I kind of lost track of Peter Alsop. For years, I’d simply run into him on the street. He was always about, and always up for a chat.

Then, one day, I realised he wasn’t around. He’d exited this world, quietly, without any great fanfare, a few months earlier, in late 2014. I’d missed it altogether.

I felt ashamed of myself. But Peter Alsop’s departure was the far greater shame.

Before he died, he was awarded a Master of Engineering degree by Deakin Uni. He didn’t last to its actual conferring, and there was a deep sadness to the extensive, and well-deserved, tribute later extended him by the uni’s former architecture head and deputy VC Daryl LeGrew.

More recently, I got wind that another friend of Peter Alsop was working on a novel inspired by this remarkable quiet achiever.

Like me, author Gregory Day tripped to Peter’s extraordinary knowledge in a casual kind of fashion. Peter was a regular visitor to the Barwon Booksellers store in the city’s James Street, where Greg works, and the pair connected on numerous streams of cerebral consciousness.

Day elaborates on these in the book, A Sand Archive, his latest in a series of award-winning novels in which he regularly draws on all manner of curious Otways coastal and hinterland life and nature – even a little of the paranormal.

Author Gregory Day. Picture: Simon O’Dwyer

The chief character, FB Herschell, is unmistakably Alsop. He’s working on the Great Ocean Road with the CRB and battling to find a fix for regular but unpredictable subsidence caused by the fact parts of the road are built on shifting sand dunes.

The young FB, anxious to study sand dunes and their properties, heads for France where he finds himself in the middle of the fevered 1968 Paris social demonstrations and riots, and falling in love. It’s a complex, magical, poetic and elegiac story.

Day’s sense of place is anchored in Geelong, the Great Ocean Road but especially in Aireys Inlet, or more traditionally Mangowak. He’s as remarkable, in his way, as Herschell or Alsop.

A poet, a musician, writer and environmentalist, his Patron Saint of Eels, The Grand Hotel, Archipelago of Souls, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds  and other works have won him a string of literary awards.

His great mate, Lorne’s Greek fisherman-poet, the late Christos Raskatos, once told me with great affection that he was mad. Day’s own poetry is downright wicked.

It’s a terrible pity he’s not about to read it but I’m not quite sure what Peter Alsop would think, being held up to such attention, in Day’s latest novel. Given his self-effacing manner, I suspect he’d have been kind of mortified.

If it was me, I’d be bloody delighted.

— A SAND ARCHIVE, by Gregory Day, is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador.

Travelogue: Zombie monk island

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Zombie monks, rocky waterfalls, distressed elephants, phallic landmarks and dodgy caiparinha cocktails … welcome to the Thai jungle paradise of Koh Samui.

Coconut island. Or so it used to be. Now the coconuts are imported-on jets from Australia, the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, mainly.

They’re looking for sun, snorkelling and Singhas. One thing to know, just quickly, is when you get on the turps in Samui, check you’re not drinking real turps, or ethanol as might be the case.

The young fraulein next door at my Fisherman’s Village resort wasn’t so judicious, and copped two bouts of home-brew poisoning from cocktails. Should have learned the first time.

The caiparinhas still taste okay to my mind. A bit odd maybe but the cachaca they’re usually made from can be pretty dodgy anyway. And as my octogenarian Brazilian gynaecologist mate Dr Mario often told me: “Caiparinha can cure a lot of ills but it can create a lot of ills, too.”

Why they’re even selling Rio caiparinhas in Samui’s a fair question but, hey, it’s the tropics. Why not? It’s hardly the only oddity.

My Samui oddities actually start on the plane. The MA128 redeye. Poor Indian bloke lost his shoe, which he’d kicked off before falling asleep. Found it up the other end of the plane after a rigorous search aided by a strident Probus toastmistress telling anyone not blessed with deafness that this poor chap had lost his shoe.

“How could that possibly happen?” she repeats over and over as if an answer would materialise if she asked often enough. But a dozen times doesn’t do it.

My missus, laughing into her airplane pillow almost enough to accident (my new verb), confesses in whispered hysterics: “I kicked it on the floor when I went to the toilet in the middle of the night. I thought I’d keep kicking it and see what happened.”

Ha, ha, yes very droll, I think as I congratulate the poor sable sap on his shoe’s eventual return. He seems buoyed by the feigned concern masking the fear my significant other might burst out laughing. Or worse.

The peculiarities continue apace. At the ethanol bar, Coco Tam’s, I see two young blokes belting the suitcase out of each other shortly before midday. I think it’s part of a promo stunt as a truck-load of midgets drive past bellowing “Tonight, tonight!” to advertise a Muay Thai boxing tournament. It’s something else. They don’t want to discuss it with me.

Strikes me as odd, too, to later see a bullfight on local tellie with excited locals spilling over the fence as two bloodied buffalo rammed heads and horns in a nasty test of testosterone. Drags on for half an hour, again with a screeching harridan beseeching her wager to take out the other beast.

In the end, one bull just ambles off. He’s had enough. So have I. My taxi driver proudly points out the stadium, a dirty paddock, the next day. Certainly no Spanish matador’s gilded arena but I’m warming to the Samui strangeness.

At Wat Kunaram, in the island’s south near Ban Thurian, I find Buddhist devotees praying to Luang Phaw Daeng, a monk who’d predicted the day of his death at age 79 back in the 1970s. He fasted and fed himself a special diet that’s purportedly responsible for his body’s mummified state ever since.

The monk’s corpse sits upright in a large glass case, his head assuming a rock star aspect because of the sunglasses shielding his no doubt spooky-looking eyes from scrutiny.

Yeah, it’s zombie-creepy but the religious ectoplasm floating about lends the show a nice Zen aspect. Monks chanting in the temple to the rear, and another bright and colourful new temple next door again extend further gravity to what’s patently a con.

Not so sure about the jovial monk at the Big Buddha temple at Bo Phut. For a few bob, he happily half-drenched me, splashing water over my head and repeating “Goolark, goolark!” at great pace for a couple of minutes. Tell him I’m on my honeymoon and he nearly falls off his perch laughing.

The “goolark” seems to come to fruition the next morning with a phone call from home with a tidy new contract. The financial reporting season also turns up a larger-than-expected return on a few stocks I’d squirrelled away.

I keep smiling and drive south to Lamai’s Hin Ta and Hin Yai — two rocky protruberances loosely resembling a penis and a female pudenda. Grandpa Rock and Grandma Rock are an immensely popular tourist drawcard with stalls, spielers, restaurants and hotels all around.

Sex might sell in the fleshpots of nearby Chaweng but here it sells in the diluted version of geological anatomy.

A fat Japanese bloke poses on the ground, prostate, with grandpa strategically positioned to emerge from his midriff. Giggling European girls pose with fingers pinching poor old pop in the background. The Muslim girls are up for a laugh, too.

Others place their young children in front of grandpa for a family happy snap. Camera tricks and dick tricks corroborate in a tropical puppetry of the penis.

The Samuis like their rocks. My hotel, the Beluga, is built around them. In addition to its fluorescent indigo, lime, blue and red lighting, the hotel features smart, glazed rocky faces metres high and metres long in the walls of its rooms. My bathroom is a rocky cavern with a shower and a dunny and a few tiles. Quite remarkable, too, if not especially sexy.

It’s Greek-inspired Thai contemporary architecture. All blazing white stone, sparse vegetation – a central frangipani and a palm or two only – and designed by a Frenchman named Roman. Go figure.

Nearby is local tourist trap Valentine’s Rock, which you can pose beneath for 100 baht, alongside hosts of heart-shaped sculptures. Get your toes nibbled by fish in a pond, too, if you fancy. Or pose by the two-metre wooden penis central to the park there. Someone got through Samui Tourism 101 with flying colours.

If you like your rocks hot, you can climb up the hill to a café with a balcony lookout over Lamai and its ever-encroaching palms and jungle, and fishing boats out to sea. A fistful of wooden hashtag signs await your photo-selfie opportunity: #lovely #viewpoint, #hi and the likes.

The German honeymooners who ask me to snap a photo of them have a #inlove sign. Where’s a #frankfurt sign when you need one, I wonder.

A wobbly funicular with cheerful giggling guides, and consignments of coconuts for the café, will take you up upwards if you’re thinking rugged be buggered. Whatever you do, don’t take the car. The grade is ridiculously steep.

Night falls and my neighbours have erected a pair of wooden teepee frames, adorned with fairy lights, and a swag of turquoise bean bags, atop the granite tor adjoining our two hotels. So we sit on the beacon rocks as the sun tumbles behind us into the jungle and fishing boat lights emerge on the horizon. Frosty Singhas complete the scene.

Full-body tattoos, G-strings and bare-butt wide-crochet skirts, hotel staff in white cotton trousers, tees and waist sashes seem the order of the day in this part of the world. If you’re wearing anything, that is. One thing I spy are scars which it unfolds are painful stinger tattoos left on those silly enough to swim in the ocean waters at night. Vinegar and raw alcohol help but best you don’t harbour any such ambitions.

The barman making me a caiparinha, Wun Chai, is a father in waiting. Any day now. His wife and first child are in Myanmar, where he was born. He’s hoping to see them in four or five months, when next he gets shore leave. Long and anxious wait. He shows me pretty photos.

I discover a strange bar among the giant seaside boulders beside Grandpa and Grandma. It’s a reggae bar cum tree house cum memorial to Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Not a straight line in the place and two beers under your belt you become a serious leg injury liability. Drop a match and you’d all be toast.

But the place is rather brilliant. Cushions galore, ladder steps everywhere, crooked branch handrails, red and yellow lighting… it’s a kind of deranged Peter Pan Lost Boys cubby hut meets Pirates of the Caribbean Isla de Muerta bar.

It’s called The Rock Bar, of course. Looks like an underground bar buried under dried palm fronds until you delve inside, whereupon it takes on a high-rise aspect from its tangled base between several shoreline boulders.

The scent of cannabis glides up, over and through the bar’s multifarious levels. A Thai-Jamaican band has set up just inches above the incoming sea. I natter to a pleasant young English couple freshly out of India, and its food poisoning/starvation/disease horrors, and now optimistically eyeing Angkor Wat and old Saigon.

I tell them to play it safe in Australia, that our shark-snake-scorpion-spider terrors are greatly overrated. Maybe one day, they suggest. They’d rather take their chances just about anywhere else.

I wonder on, gently buzzed with caiparinha and Chang. I trip over a glass artisan busy fire-blasting a blue-eared sausage dog. Then a coach-load of Japanese tourists descending on a massive timbered seafood eatery. Then a snapper in tamarind sauce at a humble adjoining beachside restaurant where alluring chargrill scents mix uneasily with sewerage pongs. The tamarind wins, just.

The cats and dogs are plump, their pelts thick and clean, and their demeanour strangely amicable. The cat doesn’t even chase a mouse I spot on the sand. Just looks and moves on. The mouse shits itself, mind you, and whips out of its path.

One more oddity. The place doesn’t look so prosperous that the mutts shouldn’t be mangy and distemper-afflicted. And I wonder what’s happened to rabies, nature’s way of keeping the animal kingdom from taking us over.

Inland at Na Mueang waterfall, an 80-metre cascade in a pretty jungle hideaway, visitors skid and slide over slippery rocks as they seek out their perfect snapshot. Auto apertures can’t cope with the dark foliage and brilliant sunlight, though, resulting in indistinct silhouette shots.

Long-suffering elephants, swaying sadly in their chained misery, are coerced upriver to the falls with loads of tourists on their backs. The river’s anything but a sandy passage. It’s rocks, rocks and more rocks. One slip by the pachyderm and everyone’s cactus.

The island’s centre, a mess of hills covered by palms after earlier being denuded of the trees, hosts a criss-cross of roads, back-tracks and short-cuts to avoid the coastal towns. Lamai to Mae Nam takes me little more than 20 minutes in a brand-new cab with an enthusiastic driver keen to test the brakes at speed.

Mae Nam, looking out across the turquoise to Koh Pha-Ngan and Koh Toa, is a mess of hotels and resorts, dusty roads, shops and houses. And tourists seeking out Family Marts, 7-Elevens and stores with cheaper meals, snacks and beers than the hotels offer.

Inside the hotels, visitors sunbake, drink, swim and eat between yoga downward dogs, deep-tissue massages and self-pedicures walking the abrasive beachfronts. I splash about for a bit, laze about and scoff a pad thai from a neighbouring beach restaurant before sidling up to a prospective drinking buddy at the pool bar.

We bang on about San Diego and Sarawak golf courses, kangaroos, Thai food, Bangkok, the Frankfurt Motor Show, Italian and Brazilian thieves, Japan and a rambling agenda of loose travel-related stuff. Caiparinhas and Changs. Great conversationalists the two of us, hic!

 

Streets ahead at Swindon … sorry, Lara

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Major-league changes are unfolding at Lara just now as developers open the rural town’s west to new communities.

Engineers and planners are tramping across paddocks to its west, scrutinising the landscape and its possibilities, picturing in their minds streets and drains, houses and parks.

Magpies wheel about overhead, as they’ve done forever, scrutinising the newcomers but oblivious to the impending growth, and fevered building and activity it will bring.

Duck Ponds as this town was once known is undergoing a transformation with new estate, again. Odd thing, though, the first subdivision plotted for the area never happened.

Had it done so, the town might never have been Duck Ponds let alone Lara. It might have become Swindon.

Few residents of the town’s Archimedes Avenue, or Brunel Close, or Watt Street, are probably aware their home town would have been Swindon had an ambitious 19th-century adventure had his way.

Engineer Edward Snell, in a bid to generate passengers for the Geelong-Melbourne railway that he built in the 1850s, tried to develop Lara as a dormitory suburb of Geelong – the best part of a century before the actual event.

Snell, one of the early Geelong’s most colourful figures, had a subdivision approved with streets named after leading lights from the engineering profession – other names include Stephenson, Smeaton, Nasmyth and Rennie.

The proposed township was named Swindon, after the English town where the great Western Railway Company that Snell worked for prior to coming to Australia built a major rail terminus linking London and Bristol.

“He was about 100 years ahead of his time,” Geelong historical archivist Norman Houghton once told me. “Those things didn’t happen until the 1960s.”

“If you look at a current street directory, some of those names are still there today, south of McClelland Avenue.

“Edward Snell may not have directly involved in selling the subdivision, but the idea certainly was his.”

In many regards, it appears that was Snell all over – an ideas man, forward-thinking and a man typical of the intrepid breed of fortune-seekers who flocked to Australia at the time of the Gold Rush.

Snell actually arrived just before the Gold Rush but did try his luck, to small avail, on the diggings. His fortune was gleaned from the Geelong-Melbourne line and not without considerable fame and controversy.

Snell worked variously as an engineer, architect, draftsmen, surveyor and artist. He was an avid diarist and his writings about early Geelong, Adelaide, the Yorke Peninsula, Tasmania, the Murray and the goldfields are peppered with anecdotes, sketches and caricatures as well as intriguing insights into colonial Australia.

“Snell was a man of immense talent and abilities and seized his chance,” Houghton said.

Snell came under intense pressure after locomotive engineer Henry Walter was killed on the rail line’s opening day when he struck his head on a Cowie’s Creek bridge beam while waving to the nearby crowd.

According to Houghton, Snell also failed to get along with Alexander Thomson, one of Geelong’s leading pioneers, who thought the engineer’s work was sloppy.

Certainly Snell had problems of his own, according to his diaries, with his business partners, but his indomitable nature allowed him to persevere and after returning to England he retired at a youthful 38.

Who knows? Had he become a successful land developer he might have stuck around.

Might have even had a street named after himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bioplanters and new ways with waterways

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DEALING with the water run-off from a 200-lot hillside residential estate at Wandana is an engineering challenge.

Melbourne environmental engineering company Biofilta, whose Geelong projects have included Leopold’s Gateway Plaza and several indoor feature gardens at GMHBA Stadium, has taken the challenge by designing an integrated system involving water harvest, storage and treatment.

Biofilta has been involved in innovative stormwater harvesting and wetland projects across Melbourne, but the Wandana project, the Villawood Properties estate above Highton overlooking the Geelong Ring Road, presented a new level of complexity.

“There’s nothing as compact and as highly engineered as this one,” Biofilta chief executive Marc Noyce said.

“Our system works really well where there are tricky sites, steep slopes, areas where you can’t get a wetland in.”

He said the integrated system that has been installed includes 200 cubic metres of underground flood detention storage, gross pollutant capture, and a 50sq m bio-planter to biologically treat all the low flows from its steep upstream catchment.

“It also includes a separate tank holding 20,000 litres of filtered water to recirculate in hot weather to keep the plants alive without the need to use potable water,” he said.

The system provides flood protection, stormwater treatment and sustainable natural treatment in a compact footprint.

The bio-planter is a lush affair, featuring local coastal plants and sand dune plants adapted to wet and dry conditions. Two lots of microbes in the planter effectively treat the water.

“Water goes in at the top, it looks like dirty dishwater and it has the heavy metal nasties,” Mr Noyce said.

“It stops on top, soluble pollutants soak through one set of aerobic bacteria, and they really transform the pollutants. That flows to the bottom, where there’s no oxygen — that promotes anaerobic bacteria that does another polishing job of the pollutants.”

By pollutants, think everyday materials such as metal dust from roads, oil from cars, rooftop sediments, brake dust and the like — things that would eventually pose problems elsewhere.

Villawood was the first Victorian developer to receive UDIA EnviroDevelopment accreditation and is recognised for its high level of conservation and ecosystems and dedication to saving water and energy.

Chief executive Rory Costelloe said Villawood was always striving to investigate and implement any means of saving water and energy.

LINK: http://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/default.aspx?publication=NCGA

The Q Train takes out peak restaurant awards

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It’s only been operating for 10 months but fine-dining restaurant The Q Train has just taken out two peak industry excellence awards.

The Drysdale-Queenscliff gourmand rail operator on Monday won both Restaurant & Catering Australia’s prestigious Victorian Tourism Restaurant and Consumer Vote awards at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The Q Train was also a finalist in this year’s Telstra Business Awards in the “emerging and energised” category for Victorian businesses held at Crown’s Palladium Room on Tuesday night.

The Q Train, which travels along the heritage Bellarine Railway between Drysdale and Queenscliff, opened for business last October.

It is the brainchild of Michael Barclay and Andrew Bridger.

The Q Train offers two classes of dining, Q class and first class. Q class is public dining with a six-course degustation. First class has seven private dining compartments for a more romantic experience for couples with matched local wines.

The Q Train’s handsome refurbished dining cars offer diners a delicious rail journey, and unique views of Swan Bay and the Bellarine.

The moving restaurant’s restored six carriages once travelled Queensland rails as part of the “Sunlander” running between Brisbane and Cairns.

Their converted interiors now offer a first-order menu by chef Greg Egan utilising delectable local produce such as Sage Farm beef and lamb, Portarlington mussels, Barongarook pork and Wattle Grove honey. Locally-crafted beers, ciders and exclusive red and white wines shine.

The R&CA Awards for Excellence are independently judged awards that recognise exceptional service and culinary talent across Australia. R&CA represents 45,000 cafes, restaurants and catering businesses across Australia.

LINK: https://www.theqtrain.com.au/

Cricket: Aborigines, elephants and barbecued chickens

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Just spotted a great collection of stamps just released by Australia Post to mark 150 years since the first Oz cricket team toured England. All Aboriginals, neatly enough, and they fairly scared the socks off the Poms.

Great stamps of the team; mainly mono images, one with the lads resplendent in red, white and blue. If you’re into things philatelic, you’ll love them.

All reminded me of a kids book I picked up a while back called Boomerang and Bat. It was put together in memory of one of the team, a bloke called Bripumyarrimin. Mighty cricketer in his day. One of Australia’s best. Buried in England, after succumbing to tuberculosis while on that famous Aboriginal cricket tour in 1868.

Also known as King Cole, he was one of that extraordinary team initially coached and captained by Geelong’s Tom Wills, same man came up with Australian rules football. The team surprised the life out of England’s toffee-nosed cricketing aristocrats.

Smacked them all over the shop then put on corroborees, whipcracking tricks, close-up stunts belting away cricket balls thrown en masse, somersaults, tumbled backflips and threw demos with their spears and boomerangs. Johnny Mullagh, Unaarrimin, was the star of the team, carting the Poms all over the place.

Wills’ role is remarkable for the fact his father was slaughtered in the largest massacre of whites by Aborigines, five years earlier. But Wills had grown up with Aborigines and his 1866 job leading the team around Victoria and New South Wales, while a natural exercise for him, was often controversial to many colonials who saw Aborigines as savages.   

Wills was widely considered the best cricketer of his time but he’s not Geelong’s only claim to fame from the era. When Australia’s first Test team played England at the MCG in 1877, it included batsman Bransby Beauchamp Cooper, a cousin of the great W.G. Grace. He’d migrated to The Antipodes in 1869.

Cooper, a gentleman, eschewed anything resembling hard work. He refused to practise, deeming it a form of slavery, and demanded professional cricketers do the hard work of bowling and fielding. Oddly enough, he didn’t mind wicketkeeping.

Well-credentialled after playing with Grace’s teams in the 1860s in England, he later beat Grace’s team while playing for Victoria, with a personal knock of 84. Playing at South Melbourne in the 1870s, he drew such a large crowd that visiting tightrope sensation Blondin said Melbourne “had gone mad with cricket”.

Cooper worked at Queenscliff as a customs officer, dying in 1914. He is buried at Eastern Cemetery in plot CEO/6/48 if you’re curious.

I’ve had my orbs running over another book, too; Parachutist at Fine Leg, by Geelong scion and cricket encyclopedia Gideon Haigh. Veritable treasure chest of weird cricket tales. Like Sid Barnes’ 1948 jab at an umpire when a dog ran onto the field after an unsuccessful appeal: “Now all you want is a white stick.”

And South Africa’s exit from the field in Sydney 1995 after player Symcox was pelted with golf balls, fruit and a stuffed barbecue chicken. Then there was the sparrow killed by Indian bowler Jahangir Khan at Lord’s in 1936 which landed against the wicket, without dislodging the bails.  And in 1982, British customs found a consignment of bats from India  that had been hollowed out and filled with cannabis.

It’s not just the game, the old cricket. So I discovered some years back, at Barwon Heads, when a visiting circus elephant grabbed a cricket ball with its trunk after a batsman belted a four.

You’d think it happens all the time in India. You’d think maybe the pachyderm was trained and could throw it back. Nope, he just scoffed it, quick as look at you. Burp.

But my favourite cricketing yarn has to be Tarpot from that Aboriginal team toured England way back when. He could run 100 yards backwards in 14 seconds.

Like Lillee in reverse.

charango

While my charango gently weeps …

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Charango: It looks like a wooden armadillo. You know, those critters always getting skittled on South American back roads. Anteater-like, shell-dwelling rodents that musicians like to behead, gut, slap a fretboard on and then a poultice of nylon or gut strings.

Well, no animals were hurt in this musical experiment, if that’s any consolation. Perhaps an endangered timber or two — I can’t vouch otherwise. What happens in Bolivia, where this was made, is all mystery to me.

Not that that’s where I found this charango — the 10-string fake armadillo. I brought it for $US300 on the streets of neighbouring Cusco, high up in Peruvian Andes. Pig of an instrument, too.

I’ve fooled around with guitars, mandolins, bouzoukis, banjos, citterns, fiddles, mando-cellos, ch’ins, bandurias, balalaikas, instruments I couldn’t even name.

I’ve re-tuned them, de-tuned them, battered them with brass, glass and chrome slides, distortion pedals, wah-wahs, tube-screamers, samples and patches . . . all sorts of nonsense. Tortured the neighbours a good bit too, I confess. But this charango’s a tricky proposition.

I’ve watched all manner of Andean pan flute band and thrash-strumming charangeur, I’ve seen some remarkable jazz and tango extracted from the instrument. It gets me dabbling about with the creature. Confused as all get-out, mind you.

The instrument has 10 strings in sets of two, four of them in unison, one an octave apart _ in the middle of the sets. The two sets either side are roughly in the same high-pitched settings.

Rather than climbing from low to high in pitch, this thing starts high, descends and then rises up again. Basically, two sets are tuned like a mandolin, or tenor banjo, or violin _ in fifths, reconciling on the seventh fret. Four sets, one of them overlapping, are like the highest four strings of a guitar. Go figure.

I show this box of mystery to a mate who’s handy with all manner of musical critters. His eyes light up: “Murph, what a gem!” Yeah sure, I think.

“I can’t scratch a tune out of the swine. It rolls about, jumps octaves, tricks you every second note. Sounds great until you play three notes in a row,” I reply.

My mate smiles back, inscrutably. He then proceeds, gently — you don’t rush these things — to work his way through  Rondo á la Turk  on the charango.

I slide back into my seat for the ride. I don’t know what I was expecting.  Duelling Banjos, The Devil Goes Down to Georgia , some O’Carolan . . . anything but Mozart’s impossible  Rondo á la bloody Turk.  Last time I saw anyone playing that on strings it was Phil Emmanuel, Tommy’s brother.

But, nope, this was a Tuesday night, at Geelong’s Irish Murphy’s pub — barely anyone around — and a bloke sitting in the corner.

Take a bow, Geoff Sinbeck.

Singapore House, image and photo, above Eastern Beach.

Eastern Beach’s Singapore House … on the record

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SINGAPORE, 1862: It’s grainy, indistinct and blurry – about what you’d expect from a photo of a structure snapped off in 1862. But it’s startling nonetheless.

What you see, from a distance, is a long, double-storeyed structure, its ground floor well shaded by a deep verandah, overlooking a precipitous cliff with a rude goat-track path leading down its sharp face.

A rough pencil sketch from the same era shows in greater detail, if not greater accuracy, the same building, presumably a few years earlier for it lacks the distinctive verandah.

But the twin jetties reaching out into Corio Bay at the base of the cliff in front of the building leave no doubt it’s the same structure. A short-lived condominium which for a while was clearly among the best property Geelong hosted.

Singapore House, or Singapore Terrace, on what is today Eastern Beach Road, near the corner of Swanston Street, was a complex of nine adjoining buildings inhabited by more than 70 residents in what was described as “a respectable sphere of life”.

It’s fair to assume they were people of means and that developer Alexander Fyfe’s housing project, built in 1855 of timber imported from the Far East, turned him a reasonable profit.

Looking out to the water, the You Yangs and on a clear day to Mount Macedon and the Dandenongs, the building had the best view in town. This was long before peppercorns, cypresses or any other trees blocked the vista.

In fact, it wasn’t far removed from when Aboriginal humpies adorned what is now the entry to neighbouring Eastern Park at the end of Corio Street, then a roughhouse waterfront thoroughfare of stores, pubs and brothels.

In at least one of those pubs, the public bar counter doubled up as a coroner’s autopsy slab when the need arose. Bottoms up, as they say.

For many years, but now long forgotten, Singapore House was remembered as scene of the greatest and worst fire Geelong ever saw. A little like Black Friday of 1939 if you like: wicked but consigned to a history largely beyond living memory.

Looking over old pictures at The Geelong Club a while back, I tripped to the pencil sketch of the Corio Bay waterfront from Eastern Beach to Moorabool. It’s undated but I’m guessing it’s somewhere around the original club’s inception in 1859.

The sketch features names for the various buildings it depicts. Not unlike another famous picture of early Geelong’s waterfront, painted by Wilbraham Liardet from the Western Beach aspect.

It points out Corio Villa, Dr Day’s house, police quarters, pilot houses, Fyfe House, a stone wall, Bayview House — now the derelict Ritz Flats — the Volum Brewery and Macks Hotel.

Front and centre of this simple tableau, however, near the corner of Swanston and The Esplanade, is the extraordinary structure of double-story timber terrace houses.

Now I’ve tracked down a photograph. The only photograph as far as I can ascertain.

It was commissioned in 1862 by the Geelong council and features, hard and high left, in a scene of waterfront Geelong snapped from Eastern Beach. It must have been taken just weeks, perhaps days, before it went up in flames on March 18.

Welcome to Singapore Terrace.

Hope your insurance is paid up, though. For within just seven years, in March 1862, “the greatest ornament of the Esplanade overlooking the Eastern Beach” was burned to the ground.

It was a waterfront inferno to match any New Year’s Eve fireworks since, maybe even the clipper Lightning’s conflagration on the bay a few years later in 1869.

The fire started between floors and, fanned by a strong, hot north-north-westerly, proceeded to demolish the buildings, leaving all its occupants homeless.

Reports said the saddest sight was the “throng of bewildered and terrified women and children rushing from the houses”. Some were appalled at the enormity of the threat facing them, one was overjoyed at evacuating her “little ones scatheless”.

Residents and bystanders watched on, gobsmacked at the furious afternoon spectacle and the firefighting industry battling to contain the blaze. Fire brigades from Geelong, Newtown and Chilwell and their engines, buckets, hoses 60 metres up from the beach couldn’t stop the blaze from turning the resinous timber the terraces were built of from turning white hot and collapsing.

Lucky thing was no-one died in the fire. No so lucky were domestic pets — presumably dogs, cats and budgies — and chickens. Oh, and evidently, someone’s pet monkey expired as well.

Oddly enough, however, rodents that had been plaguing the area cleared out a day or two before the fire. A case, as the Irish firebrand Flann O’Brien might have noted, of rats leaving a sinking chimp.