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Happy birthday, Keni, and keep ’em coming

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Been hearing a mountain of stories lately about sick kids, hard-pressed parents, dedicated medicos and carers, and a fair tribe of corporate, trade and everyman supporters looking to help the old Royal Kiddies Hospital in Parkville.

Lengthy family history with the place going back 40 and 50 years now; one that remains a bruise and a scar, a stab of cold old grief as much as a well of warmth, care, dedication, even gallows humour fun in the face of that intransigent shrew, fate.

So it’s lovely to see things like the Good Friday Appeal in its 95th year kicking hard to raise bucks for a place that’s a world-class backstop and saviour for the families with sick kids around the country but which, for reasons unfathomable, can’t garner enough recurring funding from government to do all the work it needs to do.

I’ve found myself amid a remarkable exercise, with remarkable people, building and donating a house-and-land package to the appeal to flog off at auction and then hand over all the proceeds to the hospital. Half a million bucks worth of land, another half million and more of tradie services and materials, all gratis. My gig’s been to help plug it to media.

It’s all just one part of a much larger citizen action that generates upwards of $25 million to a fine cause but in its own right has raised more than a million bucks a year the last five years running. Which is good, and so much so, I suspect, that Spring Street’s getting embarrassed, and been donating a million itself in a crocodile-tears attempt to negate its neglect.

But my cynicism can’t eclipse the emotion tied to those people in there for all the right reasons, driven by everything from grief to gratitude, hope to humanity.

On auction day, I find myself standing beside mother-of-six Teigan Fono as her two boys, Keni and Kobi, are presented with birthday cakes on auctioneer Paul Tzamalis’ stage as 600-plus supporters of this fund-raiser sing a beautiful ‘Happy Birthday’ to them led by singer Marcus Hayden. Auspicious day for a birthday and a wonderful moment.

Teigan’s fronted every single promo event we’ve staged for this house, determined to help the hospital that removed a brain tumour from Keni in 2023 and which is still keeping close, close tabs on him.

She’s in tears. I’m not far away myself. But she has to move, Keni has to run through the banner at the Good Friday clash between North Melbourne and Carlton, and they’re dyed-in-the-wool Shinboner fans. No time to get emotional, too much to do. Lives to be lived.

Two weeks earlier, the boys were at the house for a promo when North’s Charlie Comben fronted for a bit of a kick-to-kick and an Easter egg hunt for the cameras. Major hoot for the boys. Curious intersection of things too, I thought, for Charlie’s great-uncle Bruce’s ties. To the Carlton opposition.

Bruce was the Blues captain back in the day, from 1958 to 1960. He went to God back in 2002. Charlie, born 2001, didn’t know him but has heard lots about him since. He hadn’t heard, however, how Bruce helped my kid brother during his time at the Royal Children’s, battling leukaemia back in the ’70s and ’80s.

Young Damien, aka Jack, was a dyed-in-the-wool Bluebagger. Our darling old man, Jim, played cricket against Bruce. The two also ran a barley share-crop operation on Skeleton Creek near Werribee.

When Bruce got wind of young Jack’s strife, he rounded up The Age sports journo Mick Sheahan and Blues superstar Alex Jesaulenko and sorted them up to The Royal Children’s with a footy and a photographer.

Story and pic ran back page of The Age. Just huge at the time. Been a family heirloom ever since and a masterpiece in league with the grand masters as far as we’re concerned.

Jezza and young Jack, 1976

I could probably relate any number of other connections and stories about Brucie and Mick, which are lovely, and amusing, but they struggle to match the fact Jezza turned up at the hospital again, a while later and unannounced, to say g’day and see how young Damien was going.

None of us knew until after. Brilliant. For a nine-year-old kid, something else again.

So, yeah, the house raised $1,212,000 through the effort of my mob, Villawood Properties who coughed up the land and a swag of marketing, Henley Homes and its army of tradies and suppliers, and a host of supporters including the sadly injury-prone but otherwise champion Charlie Comben.

I have to say, though, my heart goes out to Teigan, and her husband Jason, and I hope that house somehow returns the favour to Keni. A bit of positive karma in their troubled times would be just lovely.

 

Crusades and Richard’s lying heart

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Coeur de Lion

The Journals of Richard the Lionheart

By Isla Tate

Impossible to read Richard’s fictitious journals about his 12th century Holy Land warmongering without drawing parallels with the unholy oil wars in the Middle East as we speak.

East versus West for possession of Jerusalem – ground zero of Islam, Christianity and Judaism – is now about access to oil reserves, buttressed by logics equally mediaeval.

Iran, battered, brutal and belligerent, will fight its ideological/religious cause to the last civilian. The US, foolish, confused and denied oil it had untrammelled access to before the Iran conflict, is looking for a way to exit its Epic Balls-up with its dignity intact.

Fair chance it will declare victory if Tehran somehow acquiesces to providing that access once again. Which is probably what you’ll find in future dictionary definitions of vainglorious. Along with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezeula, Cuba …

Richard the Lionheart, shrewd son of the Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane, was as French as he was English and spent most of his working life at war with his family spread across two countries. The hatred, betrayal and cruelty attendant to this was oddly and ironically eclipsed, at least partially, by the Saracen Saladin’s regard for him.

No such esteem forthcoming from the East for our contemporary Richard I avatar. His fervour’s nothing on that of the Templars. His attention span’s incapable of anything resembling a siege and his military record is a draft-dodging zip. The bone spurs might have been in his head.

Richard, by contrast, was a veteran battlefield commander deemed the sharpest general in all Europe. History’s written by the victor, of course, or used to be. Nowadays it’s written by the loser, too. Neither are too accurate.

Which is a kind of undercurrent to Tate’s Coeur de Lion journals. Alluring as they are, loaded with chilling violence, gratuitous sex and Machiavellian palace intrigues, they’re also patently bullshit. He didn’t write them, just in case you’re unclear about things.

These journals, like history, politics and journalism, don’t really let the facts get in the way of a good story.

But brother versus brother, versus mother then with mother, for and against dad, not to mention in-laws, with the body count mounting all the while, make for grand coliseum stuff.

There’s nothing like a brutal evisceration or 20, let alone a terrifying flaying that makes getting burnt at the stake look good, to keep you glued to the page.

And yet there is a fair degree of truth in there.

Richard’s wife’s travails are chilling, horrifying and mysterious, their love story tragic. His brother Henry, the young king, is a bombastic, ignorant dolt. His favourite brother is a turncoat while his mother is expert at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds. His purported ally, Phillip II, King of France, is a duplicitous poltroon of the first order.

All good fodder for lovers of historic faction, naturally. Throw in a sniff of the supernatural, if religion’s not enough, such as the Hashishiyyin, or the Assassins, and their leader, the Old Man of the Mountains, and you have more than enough adventure, politics, religion, sex, violence, exotic and enigma for a best-seller.

Which, of course, is what Coeur de Lion is. And a book about what the current Middle East crusade could possibly become too. I’ve got a working title: Cur de Guerre – The Journals of Jeffrey Epstein.

Skyhooks’ Bongo reprises Oz’s glam rock

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HOOKED: Former Skyhooks guitarist Bob ‘Bongo’ Starkie and Million Dollar Riff bandmate Laura Davidson. Picture: Joe Mastroianni

GUITARIST Bongo Starkie’s colourful frill-necked lizard collar is one of Australian rock’s more curious 1970s images.
But then, his band, Skyhooks, was not known for its shy, retiring ways.
White suits and fedoras, mock Tudor vests and wimples, jumpsuits, capes, wigs, boas, makeup by the bucketload – the biggest Aussie band of the era had a fair clout on stage and screen alike.
Forty years later, Starkie’s running the show out again with a bunch of younger musical mates to critical acclaim.
The originals, he said, had either passed on, become otherwise occupied or even a tad weary of touring.
Starkie’s new band, Million Dollar Riff, has resurrected the glitz and glitter, the punchy riffs and counter-riffs, and catchy chart-busting lyrics of Greg Macainsh’s original Skyhooks hits.
The songs are driven by the powerhouse vocals of Laura Davidson to help kick up a ’70s revival storm.
Starkie was clearly excited about it when talking to the Independent, which was unsurprising given the swag of familiar favourites in the hit-kit to draw from: Toorak Cowboy, Balwyn Calling and Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo), You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good in Bed, Blue Jeans, Jukebox in Siberia, Million Dollar Riff, Living in the Seventies, Horror Movie and Ego is Not a Dirty Word and Women in Uniform.
“We’ve got the glam going, a bit of colour and movement. I’ve glitzed the band and all the boys are wearing glitter and I’ve got the lizard collar out – it’s all happening,” he laughed.
“Laura’s a great rock chick, a western suburbs girl, I found her working in AC-DSHE singing Bon Scott. She’s got a great personality and she’s great with audiences.
“We couldn’t do it without her.”
Starkie said late Skyhooks frontman’s Shirley Strachan’s high-register vocals were a hard ask for any male singer but Davidson delivered the goods in spades, making the show a “real celebration of Greg Macainsh’s songs”.
Strachan died in a 2001 helicopter accident.
“Over the years people have often requested Skyhooks tunes but the fact of the matter was you really needed someone who could deliver a performance like Shirl,” Starkie said.
“I’ve found that someone in Laura. She’s wonderful to perform with and can sing the hell out of these ‘Hooks tunes.”
Starkie, 62, said he had developed considerably on the guitar skills he deployed alongside Red Symons in Skyhooks.
“I was self-taught and I’d be more interested in getting feedback and then working out riffs to go with Macainsh’s tunes. I was learning on the job.
“It wasn’t very good musical training, idiosyncratic I call it, but it all worked. We made a lot of records and a lot of tunes but in the end it was hard to play with others, I was so used to making up my own stuff.”
Starkie hightailed it to Brazil where he found a triple-set of Chuck Berry songs and set to learning everything he could. It took a while but he figured out 30-odd songs, note for note, and feels much more comfortable with his proficiency these days.
He also teamed up with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs while in Rio for a film documentary that, regrettably, never saw the light of day.
“I’ve got some of the best footage of Ronnie in the world but it’s sitting in my garage,” Starkie said.
Bob Starkie and Million Dollar Riff will perform at North Geelong’s Sphinx Hotel on 13 February.

High-flying jungle bungle just bananas

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Took a while but I finally figured out who was responsible, thanks to young Gex’z Anei of Ubud. And all in the middle a torrential tropical Indonesian downpour.

It wasn’t Warren Buffett, or Milton Friedman, whose names and portraits are emblazoned across the mysterious Boeing 737 deep in the Balinese mountain village of Penestenan.

I know Boeing has its issues but I wouldn’t have thought it’s been crash-landing these suckers in the Ubud jungle.

Tell the truth, it’s not a wreck, it’s a hotel room, and yours for about $100 a night at the Villa Biyu Siyu, which means the hundred bananas villa.

It has most things you’ll want: wifi, aircon, hot tub, tv, workspace, swimming pool, free parking, a river and a waterfall.

You can even jump into the cockpit to play Flying High if you’re silly enough. I missed the plantains but you can pick the fattest passionfruits you’ve ever seen straight off the trees.

I’d been trying to figure the plane’s provenance since discovering it on Google Earth and visiting briefly a couple of years back. All I’d figured was some bloke named Hugo someone assembled it on his estate.

Young Anei explained he was the late Hugo J. Van Reijen, a Dutch-born economist and champion of free-market ideas, smaller government and free immigration, and head of an import/export business handling large quantities of bank notes and stamps between more than 80 different countries.

Hugo was an entrepreneur, globetrotter, artist, photographer and author, and clearly a fan of Buffett and Friedman. But why the plane?

Turns out he was a regular critic of airlines which might have something to do with things. He published the 1997 book, Why Not Fly Cheaper? How to Save in Air Travel Costs, which has become a collector’s item with Amazon asking a not-so-cheap $780. That’s a good few bananas.

Hugo was a well-known and well-regarded economic commentator, who ran conferences and discussions at his Ubud estate.

He published a photo book, Love them or hate them, more than 1000 articles, addressed international conferences and also ran up annual calendars, made by villagers in Nepal, to help along his Libertarian cause.

Funny thing, for all his celebrity, for the fact he pulled a thumping great 737 together in his back yard, locals know bugger-all about the place.

I spent a couple of hours with a GPS and a surveyor trying to locate the place a couple of years back. Even the neighbours were unaware of the aircraft.

It’s easy to find now I know where to go but, man, in the middle of an Ubud monsoon? I know who’s bananas …

See also: https://noelmurphy.com.au/blog/bushwhacked-by-the-jungle-again/

And also: https://noelmurphy.com.au/portfolio-item/fortune-favour-and-crocking-fnq/

 

Down a Merrijig rabbithole

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Tassie tiger sightings, rusty antediluvian tractors, eagles rocking the paddocks, vineyards, shearing sheds, luthiers, Teutonic headstones, redgums and wild apple trees … funny the places you frequent without ever knowing jack about them.

Running the Teutonic midget hound on her regular beach forays at Torquay has taken on too many traffic lights between Geelong and the water, necessitating a westerly detour through the verdant pasture lands, for the time being at least, of the Anglesea Road.

Aussie landscapes being the flat, acquired taste they often seem, it takes a weather eye to appreciate, even spot, the curiosities and attractions on offer. But they’re there, they are.

And no better a site to dig about than Merrijig Creek, I’ve discovered, with the aid of some cartography, a surveyor errant, some wet weather gear, sturdy boots and GPS.

My curiosity about the area was piqued years back by a cockie concerned that reports about cryptozoological critters were being played down for fear of attracting sporting shooters from out of town and savaging the local serenity.

He was being ridiculed, he griped, in the face of mauled, mutilated livestock and multiple sightings of thylacines, melanistic leopards, black pumas and big cats in general. Livestock were uneasy, farmers likewise, he argued, as his claims were poo-pooed as feral cat, fox and wild dog sightings.

Giant cats and scats are nothing new to the area, or further southwest. Might even find some ancient bunyip and more-recent yowie reports if you look hard. Try some of the pubs and drinkers will relate greyhounds painted with stripes for sport. In the gold days, client-hungry pubs painted horses as zebras.

So it’s worth turning off the road somewhere around where the road dips and tightens amid the redgums, creek reeds and green flats either side of the Merrijig culvert.

If you fancy figuring just where the creek itself runs, good luck. There are at least five tributaries running into its two main branches between all the eucalypts, cypresses, wattles, bracken, vines and grasses that pepper the landscape. But given the area’s multitude swales, saddles and berms, you’ll be imaging dozens arising from each rain before you know it.

In due course, it spills into Thompson Creek making its way through open fields to the Horseshoe Bend, around The Minya and over the Blackgate, debouching to the sea beside a statically indeterminate concrete WW2 gun bunker at Breamlea’s clothing-optional Point Impossible.

Heads up back around the Merrijig’s Freshwater-Paraparap headwaters, you’ll find not just crypto critters but more tangible woodswallows, cuckoos and orioles ringing through the woodlands along with various colourful parrots, honeyeaters and wetland species chirruping, squawking and abusing the serenity.

Also, things like Buddhist temples, an equestrian centre, a Wolseley-driven winery, stud farms, getaway cottages, pet retreats, shearing sheds, ancient tractors standing artistically sentinel  … it’s a quiet little multicultural bucolic bonanza in truth.  Kind of fits in with the meaning of Merrijig: good or well done.

Just check what your nav system or AI say if you’re looking up Merrijig. It’s just as likely they’ll send you to northeast Victoria or Ireland’s County Leitrim – might find yourself up another type of creek altogether.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 14 October 2025.

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.

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.

Island of the gods, guardians and peripatetic primates

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Peculiar pre-match entertainment for a Cats-Tigers clash when you’re kicking back peanuts and Bintangs in the Bali mountain jungle town of Ubud.

A dozen or so Barbary macaques parading alongside the bar – upside-down infants clutching their mothers, cocksure males trooping the colour – suggested a peculiar cheer squad on the march. Perhaps not that peculiar in Tigerland, though.

Oh, sorry, I take that back but it’s been said now. Maybe I can’t.

Bar staff have abandoned the traditional shanghai slingshot deterrent favoured by hotels for coloured laser beams, which seems to be taking the fun out of things. When you’ve been hissed at, spat on and tackled by the little blighters and their rabid claws, sympathy levels for primates aren’t high.

The lasers send them scarpering, non-violently. My remonstration to a staffer about new tech over old tech is countered with: “Monkeys are sacred, they’re guardians of our temples.”

Oh yeah, that’s right. If only they stuck to the temples and off the hotel balconies spooking the tourists.

Peripatetic chimps are far from the only organic entertainment on offer on the Island of the Gods, though. Look closely around the place and you’ll find all sorts of oddities.

Think tourists buying satay sticks and sausages to feed stray dogs. Café tables and chairs washed out to sea by the incoming tide. Hawker knock-offs three times more expensive than home. Locals eating with ducks off the same table. Girls in dental floss bikinis practising yoga in front of beachside diners. Missile-like fireworks blasting out to sea as Boeings come out of the sunset to land in the shadow of giant deity statues.

Then there are plantain squirrels whipping through the jungle foliage, giant snails, luminescent black and yellow centipedes, koi pond fish feeding frenzies, dragonflies galore, fighting cocks, masterful bird mimics.

  

Art’s everywhere you look. In religious offerings, in signs, sculptures, gardens, temples, carvings, buildings, shop fittings, traditional clothing, masonry, paintings, furniture … absolutely everything.

Construction’s going on everywhere, too. Jackhammers next door, pile-driving down the river gorge, massive refits to old hotels, including one opposite the ‘quiet’ room I booked.

I’m especially drawn to a giant carapace bamboo structure rising from a paddock smack in the middle of Ubud. Workers line up for a 15-minute rev-up from the boss before I wander over, stupidly barefoot on the hot black bitumen path, to reconnoitre proceedings. A tall lean bloke introduces himself as the property owner, says the double-shelled, thatch-roofed design is going to be a yoga studio.

Good bet it might draw a bit of attention, too. It’s been whipped up by bamboo’s wunderkind architect, Pablo Luna  – known for blending Bali’s tri hit karana philosophy of harmony between people, nature and spirituality with environmental, sustainable and biomimicry principles into his work.

It’s a fair matrix. Almost as cross-pollinated as his background:  a Chilean-born architect of Peruvian/Lebanese heritage who studied in New York before taking his work to Indonesia and South-East Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico, India and Chile.

No doubt it will slot right in with Ubud’s wealth of health and wellness practitioners. No shortage of anything in that jungle; from soothing didgeridoo drones through fusion vegan iterations to breatharian starvation rackets, propped by a multitude of souls seeking happiness, self-awareness and more Zen in their lives. For all the healing they provide, I think Lomotil’s somehow got the jump on them.

The real thing about somewhere like Ubud, and the broader Bali, is the island itself and its natural geographical attributes. A mountain bike ride, a handful of temples and waterfalls, maybe some whitewater rafting, a few palms and a rice terrace or two are about the extent of things the punters will investigate outside the insane gridlock of Seminyak and Canggu.

 

Which is a pity. I’ve had a dog-eared topographical map of the island for a while now, a bright green-coloured thing of valleys, mountains, volcanoes, precipitous gorges, rivers, lakes – a surveyor’s paradise, or maybe nightmare. Contained within its cartographic swales and saddles are a trove of ridiculously stunning tracks and defiles, villages, waterfalls, panoramas, rivers, ravines, coastal outlooks, islands to ponder, jungle …

I’ll be happy to keep ticking off place names for next decade or two given half the chance. If the bloody monkeys don’t give me rabies, that is.

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