While Not Working

I officially started (again) at the mouth of the Murray. I even found a sign to make it all legitimate.  Roger dropped me off and headed back to Goolwa to watch all the sail boats come in to Goolwa on the return leg of the Goolwa-Milang-Goolwa Regatta. Unlike the dash-for-cash, they were really racing. He was happy. Pedaling an unloaded bicycle and with a stiff tailwind, I zig-zagged across Hindmarsh Island, first beside the Mundoo Channel and then past salt pans and derelict windmills.  Egret at the Mundoo Channel boat ramp. I stopped at the Charles Sturt cairn in the middle of the Island. It was around here that Charles Sturt and Collett Barker finally glimpsed the waters of Encounter Bay, thus completing their exploration to find the mouth of the Murray. Things didn't end well for Collett in 1831 though: he swam the mouth of the river to the Coorong and was promptly speared by the locals who mistook him for a marauding seal hunter who had been raping local women. Sadly, Col...

  ​​Back in 1887 Franz Oscar Wallin, henceforth known as Charlie, arrived in Australia after spent from ages 14 to 19 in the Swedish Navy.  On his way home from the Navy he got distracted by the merchant navy, hopped on board a ship to Australia, and never went home.  He settled in on the Murray River where he built and ran a fleet of paddle steamers. Charles and his wife Daisy had three children, of whom Oscar was the only one to survive past infancy. Charles had high hopes of young Oscar continuing the family business and named his newest paddle steamer 'Oscar W' after the boy.  1914 rolled around and young Iscar went off to war and never came home but the little paddle steamer that bore his name survived the advent of railways and the internal combustion engine and became a pleasure craft.  Crewed by a passionate team of volunteers, the Oscar W takes tourists out for joy rides on the river between the barrages and Milang.  Seeing as I was ...

"I'll ride my bike up the beach to the Murray mouth," said someone rather too confident for her own good.  "I did that two years ago and it was fun: the beach was flat and hard and the tide was out." I rode along the river on the way to the beach, past private jetties with comfortable fishing seats. Past the bridge to Hindmarsh Island, and along the new wharf. Smartypants me should have a) read the tide times properly and b) not assumed that the beach would be the same as it was when I rode along it two years ago.  The beach was half the width of two years ago, rough, and prone to unexpected soft patches.  And to add insult to injury, the tide was coming in from a higher baseline than what I had anticipated.  I plugged away into a headwind with the morning sun in my eyes, resolutely looking for bright sides. There were birds. And a jogger.  Doesn't matter where you are, there's always a jogger. Being the woman of persistent plan-adherence that I am (not)...

I think I'll ride my bike along a river. South Australia, being the dryest state in a very dry continent, is slightly lacking in the river department. The state's longest and largest river, the Onkaparinga, comes in at a whopping 88km and for most of its journey is barely more than a creek.  That's not to say that South Australia doesn't have river credentials in the shape of the Murray, it just has to share the Murray with Victoria and NSW.  And Queensland, if you include the Darling and assorted other tributaries. The Murray Darling River system starts at The Head in Killarney, a scant 200km from the sea but on the wrong side of the ridge to take the short route to the east coast. Instead the waters that fall at the Head make their way into the Condamine and start a long journey to eventually meet the ocean at Goolwa in South Australia. Along the way the river shows a remarkable reluctance to go to the sea, changing names, gathering tributaries, and losing itself i...

I'm back up the hill in Mount Barker, doing a re-run house sit with two feisty little daschunds that you might remember from this time last year.   Butter wouldn't melt in our mouths. Not that they remembered us at all, barking their little heads off the minute we arrived to meet and greet their humans and find out (oh joy!) that they (the humans, not the dogs) had installed automatic watering over most of their extensive garden.  Roger woke every morning to the hiss and splutter of sprinklers, imagining his former self going through the complicated process of turning taps and timers on and off while dodging last night's rabbit poo in the early morning light. The garden was lovely too. It only took one dinner for Dog 1 to decide that we were OK humans in lieu of his own.  Alas, Dog 2 remained unconvinced.  She grudgingly accepted me as a warm body against which to snuggle on the couch at night but Roger was firmly in the Scary Man camp.  She refused to come...

We booked a cottage in Milang to while away the 6 day gap between one house sit and the next. Sandilira was just over the road from Lake Alexandrina and had powerful air conditioning which was extra helpful because we arrived in the middle of a heat wave.   Sandilira: home for almost a week. The streets of Milang were deserted: everyone stayed home and tried to stay cool. Mind you, the streets of Milang were usually pretty deserted anyway, but the heat haze shimmering over the bitumen wasn't usual for Milang. I opened the fridge to put away our groceries and oh my goodness me, was I surprised! There was enough food in there to feed a small army for a month: milk, bread, butter, strawberry jam and a punnet of strawberries, a dozen eggs, a large container of mushrooms, and a medium-sized pig's worth of bacon. Not to mention 6 small tubs of yoghurt, one large tub of yoghurt, and all the breakfast cereals in the cupboard. This was not a hardship posting. We settled in for a comfor...