Return to Oz

Looks like it may be on the cards in a couple of years...I'm excited already!

If it was just down to me, it would divide up into time in Sydney with chums and family, time in Cairns and time in Arnhem land in the Northern Territories. But that is a lot of travel. Cairns, well that's exquisite rainforest and more of the Barrier Reef, as we have barely begun to explore it...Arnhem land would fulfil my need for history and culture. There's some extraordinary art created up there, and I have heard a lot about it. We would need visas or something from the Northern Land Council, because much of it belongs to the Yolngu people.

People talk about Uluru being the sacred centre of Oz, but the red rock is not something I must see yet. I don't worry about some heart of the land thing. I'll find it wherever; a compass is not a key and I don't need to stomp into someone else's shrine to find my way.

My dreams were momentarily stumped when family members mentioned Western Australia as a possible break. I mean, Perth, what's around Perth? Beware of any place that bangs on about its wineries too much, it means there's nothing else. One of my favourite people in the world comes from Perth, and told me he was not sure I would care for it. 'It looks two dimensional, flat against the desert behind it,' he told me, 'And it lacks that hip-deep-in-ghosts thing you love...' But Perth was his home, so he was perhaps prosaic about it. When I look at the diving possibilities, they are stunning for wrecks and wildlife...turtles, hump-backed whales...obviously there's the shark thing, but I have decided to ignore it. Travel, travel, travel, always brings me to life!

Dreaming because yesterday was a hard day. I am going to write today. And Oz is a grand hope for tomorrow.

Simple Moral

One of the nice things about living here is the light: the house faces west, the kitchen faces east, and the french windows open out onto our back yard full of sunshine and green. There's also a lot of bees and butterflies, many of whom come into the house and then hang around looking a bit lost. I try my best to coax them out: sometimes I wave honey at them, sometimes I use the old mug and card trick, other times I grab a tall stem and try to get them to sit on it so I can take them to the garden. This often results in some insect being pursued around our ceiling by a giant random flower that is clearly trying way too hard to be alluring; at best they ignore it, at worst they actively avoid it.

Today a butterfly sat in our kitchen fixating on the big blue. It had parked itself on a non opening type window. I stood there casting my mind around for ingenious ways of persuasion, until I finally just cupped my hands over it, and took it outside. I had honestly forgotten this as an option, so used am I to considering myself hopelessly clumsy. It sat on the palm of my hand for a while, then took off into the sky.

Sometimes escape is much easier than it looks.