While Not Working

Bourke was, in its heyday, a significant transportation hub boasting several paddle steamer companies, a Cobb & Co coach terminus, a large Afghan community supporting the camel trains that traded further west, and in 1885 a railway link which heralded the beginning of the end of the era of river transportation. Having woken up alive and unscathed in Bourke, we tootled off to check out the replica of the original dock with its multiple levels to accommodate the changing levels of the river. Morning on the Darling.  The river was alive with fish and birds, although signs along the levee bank informed us that this wasn't always so.  Back in the days of the paddle steamers all the snags and fallen trees in the river were summarily removed to both clear the way for and fuel the voracious appetites of the paddle steamers.  This had the unfortunate effect of allowing the river banks to erode away and the fish stocks died as they relied on submerged snags and logs to li...

"I'll be very disappointed," I said as I buckled my seat belt bright and early on a crisp Roma morning. "If I don't see emus today. There are always emus between Charleville and Cunnamulla." But first we had to leave Roma. Last views of Roma's main street in the early morning. Early morning shadows highlighted the tracks of harvest, west of Roma. The bikes were always with us. We had to buckle our belts and do some serious traveling after all the lollygagging and sauntering and doubling back and riding bicycles over the past eight weeks. We didn't stop other than to swap drivers and for Roger to take his back for a walk. The roads that ribboned under our wheels were familiar from years of working throughout the area. The little towns along the way had changed very little, if at all: a few more shops closed, the odd new one open. After several good seasons the country wore a healthy coat of grass. We had morning coffee in Charleville, under the watchf...

Roger didn't have much work this week and that was a good thing because he got sick and spent his time being miserable instead. I, on the other hand, spent three days in my actual physical workplace and couldn't imagine how I ever managed to work full time what with all the concentrating that was required, not to mention dressing properly and talking to real people and having to use swipe cards to go through doorways.  When I wasn't working I was busy appreciating the fine cooking skills of all my friends, drinking tea and coffee, and having a jolly good catch up with everyone. The end result of working, socialising, and being sick was that we only had one day to rummage through our storage shed for the stuff we needed. This proved unexpectedly difficult because when we packed our stuff away we didn't think about any future rummaging, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing packing carton Tetris to find the boxes I needed, and then discovering that what I was rum...

Almost two years ago we packed all of our stuff (what remained after a purge of selling and giving away) into a storage shed in Roma, on the assumption that we would soon be moving it into new digs in South Australia. Then along came house sitting and we ended up quite enjoying living in other people's houses and looking after other people's pets, and all our stuff stayed snugly in its shed. Now we had to visit our shed, find out what had survived the mouse plague in which we left it, and retrieve some minor necessities that we hadn't intended to abandon for quite so long. Last farewell to pineapples.   We made sure to make the most of the last cooked breakfast before leaving the pineapple palace and getting on the road to Roma. Roger was in his element, oohing and aahing over the parlous state of the Toowoomba bypass and greeting his old friend the Warrego Highway with fond recognition and anticipation of many changes at various intersections. The Warrego spooled under our...

We stayed in a little blue caravan tucked in against a verandah with an open-air ad-hoc kitchen, two sun loungers outside under an umbrella, and a neat little bathroom which quite possibly did not have any type of council approval.  Pineapples plastered the curtains and throw pillows, dangled from key rings, and clustered as decorative containers in corners. It was a veritable Pineapple Palace.   Our host served breakfast on the verandah in the morning with,  as befitted an eccentric host providing a pineapple palace, no discussion as to what breakfast would entail. We did as we were told and ate what was put in front of us and very nice it was too. We spent a few days in the Pineapple Palace.  Every morning I walked down to the sea to watch the night retreat before returning to the Palace to find out what I was having for breakfast that morning. Morning light on city buildings, ...and on the bridge.   We spent the days adding to our tea and cake overdose and ca...