While Not Working

  "I wonder who'll be the first person to be buried here?" mused Harvey, a Royal Navy Surveyor helping out with the creation of the Morgan Cemetery back in 1889.  Little did he know that the very next day he would drown in the river and the dubious honour of being the first inhabitant of the Morgan Cemetery would belong to him. The cemetery was tucked away discreetly on the edge of town, but not so the morgue.  Victims of accidents on the river were dropped off in Morgan via steamer, and a little morgue was built right at the ferry terminus, a receiving house as it were for those en route to the cemetery.  The morgue was still there, but thankfully the only corpses in there now belong to spiders and flies. Morgue details. I took the scenic walk around Morgan, dutifully reading all the information in my pamphlet, and now I share it with you whether you want it or not. Morgan is in the traditional lands of the  Ngaiawang  people.  Nganguruku  people...

 My bicycle has a serious problem. It seeks out bakeries and then forces me to visit them. I am powerless to resist. I think it just likes posing under pretty umbrellas It waited impatiently while I packed up my camp at the Murbko Lutheran and did battle with voracious ants. I ate my boring breakfast of crackers and peanut butter all the while a bicycle whispered in my ear of coffee and cake. It huffed and puffed as I stopped at yet another lookout to take yet another slew of river photos. Take one of me, too! It grumbled as I came to a halt in the Morgan Conservation Park, seduced by clouds of Darling lilies whose scent and sight took me right back to my childhood on the flood plain of the Condamine. It reluctantly dawdled along the access track past National Park campgrounds and river shacks full of people packing up their weekends and heading home on a sunny Sunday midday. And it complained about having to share the ferry with a ute, a barking dog, and yet another taciturn fe...

  South Australia had elections and I was up bright and early, complimentary weetbix all eaten, ready to do my democratic duty on the way out of town. "I don't think you can vote in Swan Reach," said the other woman staying at the pub. "My daughter works here and she's voting in Nildottie."  Which I found surprising because of Nildottie's general closed-ness, and because the AEC assured me that I could vote at the Swan Reach Town Hall. The AEC was right of course.  Alas, I got there too early for the democratic sausage sizzle. "Never mind, I'll get one at Blancheview," thought I. It was not to be: in a thoroughly unAustralian move Blancheview was not providing democracy sausages. I feel cheated and may start a political party dedicated to ensuring that everyone who turns up to vote is entitled, nay forced, to take a democracy sausage with or without onion. Democratic duty done with ease and alacrity, I took the ferry over the river again (s...

  There were no factories to wake me up in Walker's Flat, but the pelicans had plenty to say in the early morning.   I caught the ferry back across the river with another chatty ferryman who had started work at midnight and done the graveyard shift.  I don't think many people use the Walkers Flat ferry between midnight and 07:00, when everyone has to go to work and there's a huge rush, at least four cars waiting so I'm told. I didn't even try to ride up the road from the ferry to the top of the cliff and Forster's lookout.  Forster was on this side of the river and Walker Flat was on the other side and goodness me, don't confuse the two.   Looking north, with Walkers Flat ferry visible below. And south. The road meandered along the cliff top with, glory be, both a downhill trend and a tail wind.  I stopped off at the Len Kroehn Lookout, I took river pictures too, but this a glad-I'm-not-on-the-road-at-the-moment picture. and Smoke Signal Hill, wit...