Wet Christmas

In hindsight, that bit last week about Bundaberg reaching 28 degrees on Christmas Day might have sounded a tad optimistic, but it did actually reach a top of 29 degrees, if only combined with the city’s worst flooding since 1942.

The seriousness of the situation was only brought home when we saw that American networks like CNN were running reports: 200,000 people affected; 22 towns and cities inundated or isolated; forced evacuations; affecting an area larger than France and Germany combined. Combined. And in some places, it’s only getting worse.

We’re a week out and Bundaberg still resembles a lumpy soup. At its height, a third of the city was under water, forcing nearly 400 people to be evacuated. The Burnett River - usually looking resplendent with moored boats, hundred year old bridges, daily trawlers of sea-faring fish folk and the sweet smell of molasses from the sugar plantation carried on the cool breeze - rose to a peak of 7.9 metres, swamping everything I just mentioned along with it. Aviator Burt Hinkler famously flew his aircraft underneath Bundaberg's old railway bridge: if he was still around to do it this year, he’d need to pack a snorkel.

The city of Rockhampton, around 300 km north of Bundaberg, hasn’t yet reached the height of its problems, with the Fitzroy expecting to peak at 9.4 metres tomorrow, taking hold of nearly 50 per cent of the city. The Herald Sun in Melbourne highlighted another rather terrifying prospect for those residents currently swimming away from their possessions and towards drier confines. Wendy Hilcher is an ambulance officer for the RSPCA, who has been rescuing people’s pets all week, but an attempted rescue on Sunday was aborted when she noticed a crocodile in the water. Brown snakes have also been spotted. “It's not just the safety aspect of getting to these places, it's what's in the water itself,” she said.

Scenes of cataclysmic flooding is a particularly familiar media sight nowadays: cars breached with only their rooftops on show; the two-way reportage with bone-dry journalists, usually with a lake in the background which used to resemble a shopping centre; then into the houses, where a defeated couple sludge through their possessions, some even managing a weary note of optimism: “I’ve never seen it this bad,” or “it’s a good job we’ve got some Wellies.” My girlfriend's reaction to seeing her old netball courts - the ones she played on as a child - completely submerged sparked a clearly more personal response. And expletive, it would seem. Once safe in Brisbane, she could only gasp in horror at the scenes unfolding, saying the word ‘shit’ repeatedly.

Complete helplessness, and a sort of resigned acceptance; those were my feelings when the rain hadn’t stopped since we had arrived a week previously on Christmas Eve. Quite alarmingly, we were told when we arrived that it had “been like this for two weeks,” and many agreed that, yes, they had never seen it this bad.

There is science behind all of this, by the way, as the east coast of Australia is currently enjoying a particularly severe La Nina affect (the opposite of an El Nino), which has something to do with cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that has caused Queensland’s rainfall to increase by six times over the December average. But when you’re there, in a state of limbo, during a religious festival, facing the relentless pitter-patter and steady drowning of a quiet country sugar town, you can’t help but feel a significant biblical overtone - real Old Testament stuff, that of great plagues, vengeance, apocalypse. The relief of having a one year old in our midst with the name Noah was at least a little reassuring.

As rivers swelled, peaked and spilled, the main concern was a swift exit from Bundy before high tide hits, the only roads are blocked and we’re done for. The house suddenly resembles a particularly serious scene from ‘CSI: Bundaberg’ with would-be forensic experts on the phones to police advice bureaus and relatives surveying the ground for clues, analysing depths and water gages like trainee meteorologists, discussing locations of evidently severe importance: “Kendall’s Flats is totally under,” says one. “McCoy’s Creek is up. If you get through the Isis in South Childers there’s further damage at Maryborough with the Bruce Highway blocked towards Gympie.”

We were restless, awaiting a parting of the waves, eventually fleeing a derelict scene just before the air lifting started. And if you need further proof of Australia’s vast meteorological unpredictability, when all of this was happening, a heat wave in South Australia saw temperatures reach 43 degrees. In Bundaberg, however, you could forget goannas running up gum trees, or even cricket in the garden, as the constant rain ultimately proved the season to be not too dissimilar from a damp, traditionally English Christmas.

Here are some more of our Bundy Christmas photos.

And my personal favourite...

Home Sweet Home

A few weeks ago, I commented on the sugar cane fires that used to be a regular sight in Bundaberg. I had been reliably informed that farmers don’t tend to set their fields ablaze quite so much anymore - “health and safety gone mad,” probably - but this certainly wasn’t the case earlier in the week, where a number of local farmers turned their crops into smoke-filled scenes from Apocalypse Now. A striking sight, I think you’ll agree. This is done to kill any vermin in the undergrowth, and careful attention is paid to contain the blaze and avoid any wild fires spreading into neighbouring fields. Which is why cane fires only ever happen at winter time when the temperature is cooler, and the crops are appropriately sheared before hand. We chanced upon this one just as the sun was setting, but I counted four other fields which had been set alight, all within relatively close proximity.

This asylum seeker row in Australia looks likely to unsettle Labor’s chances in the forthcoming election, despite the party taking a more hard line approach and adopting a change in leadership. I find it particularly hard to fathom the notion of the opposition: that so-called ‘boatpeople’ might pose a threat to the Australian way of life and - this reason seems most peculiar - that Australia might not be able to support any more people. Former PM Kevin Rudd put forward the idea of the ‘big Australia’ when he came to power in 2007, with plans to increase the country’s population to 35 million by 2050. Let’s put this into perspective: the population of England is 50 million, and, yes, nearly two thirds of Australia is arid desert - completely uninhabitable - but considering that you can roughly fit around 50 Englands in Australia, we’re still talking about an incredibly vast area of land. If there is anywhere in the world where these desperate people could feasibly go, then surely it is Australia.

The ‘big Australia’ was Rudd’s way of curbing the country’s aging population. As the number of Australians aged between 65 and 84 looks set to double in the next 40 years, there will need to be a steady stream of eligible workers ready to plug the financial gaps, not just to provide the necessary pensions and health provisions required, but to also cover the deficit as new retirees step out of the workforce. And who will plug that gap? Well, there have been three boats full of people since last Sunday who would be quite prepared to help, considering that the vast majority have already been unceremoniously displaced from their own countries (many of Australia’s recent arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) and have survived a long, arduous and uncertain boat ride in some considerable discomfort just to come here.

Peter van Onselen, writing in The Australian, put it well when addressing the fact that since 2007 - when Kevin Rudd’s Labor came to power - only 4,500 refugees have attempted to seek asylum in Australia, many of which have been assessed as eligible to fit into the country’s yearly quota of 13,750 refugees. “Australia's refugee numbers will always be low because of something called the ocean,” he writes.

But there is a clear notion of ‘not in my back yard’ going on here - as new PM Julia Gillard faces strong local opposition to the building of an offshore processing centre in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country 400 miles northwest of Darwin. The East Timor parliament rejected the idea on Monday, and Gillard has been playing down the embarrassment ever since, now setting her eyes on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island while negotiating new terms with East Timor in what appears to be a large scale refugee version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A cartoon in The Weekend Australian by Nicholson depicts Gillard telling a reporter that “we won’t rush our decision” as an octopus sprawls its tentacles over boxes labelled with a number of different locations - a parody of the German octopus who was alleged to have correctly predicted a number of significant results at this year’s World Cup. For Gillard, barely three weeks into her new position, the immigration issue is proving to be her toughest challenge yet.

But the history of Australia’s immigration policy has never run smoothly, and there are echoes in Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s ‘turn back the boats’ rhetoric that, distastefully, conjures up memories of the country’s more extremist past. It is worth noting here that Abbott has since refrained from using this soundbite and even corrected it, claiming that the Opposition (a coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals) will only turn back boats as a deterrent to people smugglers. But still, such corrosive language only acts to highlight inherent concerns about the dangers of immigration, a populist thought from the more right wing members of Australian society.

We’re yet to comment on the 'White Australia' immigration policy, which was inherited by successive parliaments over a period of 72 years, and prohibited people from entering the country on the grounds of race. Moreover, it was only abolished in 1973, after taking a period of roughly 25 years to dismantle.

The argument for such legislation was originally and primarily targeted against Chinese and Japanese labourers who, during the turn of the century, started arriving into Australia in large numbers for work on gold mines and sugar plantations. Chief organiser of the policy, Alfred Deakin, put it like this in 1901: “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.” Those wishing to enter the country would have to pass a controversial dictation test, obviously in a language which they couldn’t understand, all as a means of placing “certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants,” according to the words of the original Act.

For another example of racially-motivated border provisions, we need to turn to the unsavoury character of Pauline Hanson, a former fish and chip shop owner who started her political life as a Liberal MP, before leading her own One Nation party with a strong anti-immigration stance. She made a fiery maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1996, which explained how she wanted ‘multiculturalism abolished’, among much else. “If I can invite whom I want into my home,” she said, “then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

In 1997, Hanson took the strange step of recording a video of herself to be played in the event of her assassination, leading with the words: “Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered.” Disconcertingly, One Nation picked up quite a sympathetic following, acquiring one quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections of 1998, causing a rise in right-wing parties to form across the continent with equally strong and verbal anti-immigration policies.

All of which makes Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ prophesy even more courageous in the face of such opposition from certain ugly factions of society. Of course, we should not confuse these outdated opinions from the very real and prominent issue of Australian immigration today, and Gillard is more than sympathetic to the cause. “There are racists in every country,” she said in a speech on Tuesday in Sydney. “But expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.” As a mere aside, it is worth remembering that Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet: according to the 2006 census, a population count of 20 million included citizens from over 200 countries, with 45% either born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas.

We can only hope that Gillard doesn’t completely U-turn on Labor’s initial plans in the face of mounting pressures, especially as a tactic to merely appease the dissidents and stay in power for another term.


Incidentally, a quick note on the Americanised spelling of ‘Labor’ in this context. There doesn’t appear to be any concrete reasoning for this, as the party was formally known as the Australian Labour Party since their formation in 1908, but then changed the spelling in 1912. So it was clearly a conscious decision. Some credit the change as a way of modernising the party following the influence of the United States labor movement at the turn of the century. Alternatively, it could have been altered as a need to differentiate the party name from the more general labour movement in Australia. Regardless, it seems that both spellings of ‘labour’ were used before the formation of the ALP, so the reason for the variant is all a bit subjective. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘AFL: Western Bulldogs v Port Adelaide’ (Ten)

“Port Adelaide’s forward structure is working a lot better,” says the commentator at the start of the second quarter, which is good to know, although I’m not entirely certain what form a forward structure might take, let alone one whose function is improving. Actually, I’m not really too sure of anything here, as Aussie Rules is a completely baffling sport to me. It’s played predominantly in New South Wales and Victoria, and according to one of my Queenslander friends, “I’m not even sure they understand it.”

It’s phenomenally popular, though, taking up almost daily prime evening slots that something like ‘Coronation Street’ might occupy in the UK, and on a Saturday night too. The Australian Football League is the official governing body, mass marketed just like the English Premier League, and it’s commonly referred to as ‘footy’ by its followers. This, in itself, is quite confusing, as ‘footy’ is also used to describe rugby league (and union, actually), and there have also been calls to refer to soccer as football, further confounding things. This runs the risk of serious social suicide if you’re ever asked whether you saw the footy last night. In Australia, ‘footy’ just about covers everything that involves a pitch, large balls and goals posts.

Speaking of which, there are four posts in this game - two of a slightly smaller size - and different points are allocated to a ball passing through either side. Stick one down the middle and you score even more. This much I can just about fathom, but the rest seems like an absolute free for all: there is no offside rule, as far as I can tell, so the ball can be passed up field, or just booted as far as possible and (hopefully) into the waiting arms of a team mate. Catch it properly and the whistle blows. Players back off and the ball is hoofed up field again. This seems similar to the free pass rule in netball, but there are tackles too, hefty ones, just like in rugby, while the whole game is played on a cricket pitch. To use a cooking euphemism, the sport is basically like a Spanish omelette - a real hodgepodge of ingredients with no one having any idea how they got there.

Incidentally, the Western Bulldogs are Melbourne based, and there is a nice half time excerpt of the team paying a visit to a special indigenous training school in the Northern Territories (tonight’s game is held at Darwin’s TIO Stadium). Roughly 11% of all professional AFL players are indigenous Australians, and the sport is keen to be seen as playing a major part in the regional development of poor, indigenous communities. Furthermore, the AFL’s commitment to the cause is seen as a key motivator in discouraging racism within the sport, which is unfortunately still a bit of an issue. At a charity luncheon earlier this year, high profile former footballer Mal Brown referred to Aboriginal players as “cannibals”. He bizarrely excused himself by saying it was meant as “a term of endearment”. Such instances are also apparent in the other ‘footy’ sports, but seem to be dealt with swiftly and apologetically, even if they do suggest that, behind the scenes at least, these sports are not completely exonerated just yet.

From Wonglepong with Love

Here’s a fun if ultimately juvenile way to spend an arvo: trying to find funny Australian place names. There are many, ranging from Humpty Doo in the Northern Territories right down to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The more bizarre locations derive from ancient Aboriginal terms, ranging from names of specific tribes to proverbs, landmarks and respected elders - as in the word ‘bunda’, which means ‘important man’, which when conjoined with the German word for mountain, ‘berg’, creates the name of my current location: Bundaberg.

But still, it’s hard to not crack an immature smile at any of the following: Boing Boing, Wee Waa, Tittybong, Wonglepong, Burrumbuttock, Humpybong, Moolooloo, Woolloomooloo and Bong Bong. But then even the colonialists weren’t seemingly without a sense of humour: there is a creek in South Australia called Cock Wash, while a rather steep mountain in Victoria has been christened Mount Buggery.

All of which leads neatly onto the origins of place names, and just how many locations coined by homesick English settlers are still in circulation today. In an attempt to populate their own piece of Blighty down here in Australia, you will encounter many townships in the country that still hold very recognisable British namesakes, like Ipswich, Croydon, Hungerford and Scarborough in Queensland, to locations in New South Wales like Newcastle, Kendall, Tottenham, Epping and Exeter. There’s a Peterborough in South Australia, a Sheffield in Tasmania, a Highbury in Western Australia and an Ascot in Victoria. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the names of the states themselves, with Victoria obligatorily named after Queen Victoria, similarly to Queensland, while it was Captain Cook’s original idea to name the whole country New South Wales, in recognition, allegedly, of the Welsh countryside which Cook believed bore a striking resemblance to Australia’s east coast.

I’d like to question Cook’s reasoning here, mostly because when his vessel, the Endeavour, first made contact with the eastern shores of Australia in 1770, he was surveying the botanical wilderness of the accurately named Botany Bay, which is where he first made contact with the natives, noting that “they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not.” He would then run aground in Cooktown (named thereafter) for seven weeks after crashing into the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living thing and an area of truly outstanding natural beauty. Now, I’ve been to Wales a few times, and my recollections are somewhat different. That’s all I’m saying.

I was told about Pulled Apart by Horses’ debut on the Triple J radio station via text message. They’re a scrawny bunch of shouty ragamuffins if ever there was one, and while I was drumming in Leeds band Wintermute, we played a number of live shows together and grew to be very good friends. If I think of memories of Leeds, then surely Tom screaming “I’ll make you dance with my balls of fire” on their track 'High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive' is pretty much up there as a leading thought. Or maybe the time when we stumbled into the recording of their first EP (we were practising in the same pub at the time) and assisted by shouting backing vocals into the microphone.

Their album is out now on the Transgressive label and their appearance on a Triple J playlist is big news, not solely because it’s the only decent radio station here, but mainly because it broadcasts across the whole country. Local station Hitz FM is particularly un-listenable, boasting about playing ‘today’s best new music’ before launching into 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana (from 1992), or some godforsaken nu-metal record from the late 90s. Its interpretation of ‘new music’ appears to be based solely on playing ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga three times in one day.

Huge things beckon for these chaps, which is an exciting prospect, and should hopefully be enough to keep them within easy reach of antiseptic and band aids for a very long time. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Border Security: Australia’s Front Line’ (Seven)

The main reason I wanted to talk about this particular programme is, of course, to discuss rabbits. They may be cage-dwelling bundles of cute, floppy eared domesticity in Britain, but Australia’s relations with the unassuming European rabbit has been quite tumultuous to say the least.

This is largely thanks to an early Somerset-born settler named Thomas Austin, whose pioneering expeditions in the mid nineteenth century saw him eventually acquire 11,736 hectares (around 45 square miles) of land in Victoria. Austin was a member of Victoria’s Acclimatisation Society, whose ill informed if not malicious intention was to introduce new plant and animal life into their new and bountiful environment. Yet Austin’s intentions when he asked his brother to send over 24 grey rabbits from England (along with ‘five hares, 72 partridges and some sparrows’) was less of an attempt at preservation. He wanted them so that he and his guests could enjoy a spot of game shooting. “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting,” is how Austin put it at the time, which is just about the gold standard in the history of understatement. Nothing could have been more profoundly to the contrary.

For starters, the fresh pastures and mild Australian winters proved incredibly habitable for rabbits who, being completely new to Australia, enjoyed the freedom of having no natural predators. So they started breeding like, well, rabbits: an average litter size can be between four to eight bunnies, and the female rabbit can produce seven of these a year. Couple that with the fact that new born females can start breeding from six months old and we’ve got a quick and considerable number of rabbits on our hands. So much so that the bilby - Australia’s rabbit equivalent - would almost be driven to complete extinction in the shadow of their new rival. Rising rabbit numbers feasted on native plants and dived into young trees, particularly jeopardising the topsoil on valuable farmland which would take hundreds of years to recover.

One suggestion was to build a giant rabbit proof fence to ebb the growing tide, and three were eventually built in Western Australia. The biggest stretched for over 2,000 miles and was completed in 1907 after taking six years to build. It is now known as the State Barrier Fence as it crosses the state from the north to the south - an incredible feat of engineering which, at the time, cost £337,841 (just under £20 million in today’s money) and, quite annoyingly, didn’t work. European rabbits are known for jumping to an incredible height, as well as being highly adept burrowers. Shooting was (and still is) advised to help control population growth, but this would prove just as futile. Authorities have now turned to more biological means, like the horrifically sounding ‘rabbit haemorrhaging disease virus’ which is highly infectious, causing fatal organ failure and causing a rabbit to be ready for stewing in just under 24 hours.

Although it is unfair to label the fault solely with Thomas Austin and his 24 furry friends (indeed, many other settlers would follow Austin’s lead in introducing small numbers of rabbits into Australia), the current population of European rabbits is predicted to be somewhere over the 200 million mark.

I mention all of this merely as a means of understanding why Australia is so precious, almost to the point of paranoia, with regards to the stability of their sumptuous and unique landscape. Much of the plant and animal life in Australia cannot be found anywhere else in the world, and even the slightest outside interference (like Austin’s 24 rabbits) can cause an awful unbalance. A few weeks back I mentioned the introduction of the cane toad from Hawaii which was designed to feed on the growing numbers of sugar cane beetles busily munching through crops in Queensland, but the toads were quick to concentrate on procreation instead. Since the introduction of 102 toads in 1935, they, like the European rabbit, now number in the hundreds of millions.

Now let us consider those really, really small living things, like micro-organisms found in fungus - like, say, the chytrid fungus, which is currently threatening the lives of many Australian frog species since its introduction into the country. How it got here is a matter of some considerable debate for environmentalists, whether a poisoned specimen somehow entered the country or infected water was at some stage released unknowingly. Regardless, it’s here, and the fungus remains the single biggest threat to amphibian life and the main cause in the decline of over 385 different frog species. Then there is the plant life: the Australian government spends $3.5 billion a year on the management of weeds. It is second to land clearing as the biggest threat to the country’s biodiversity. Half of Australia’s most poisonous weeds have crossed the border deliberately - ‘a third of which as garden ornamentals’.

And so we finally get to why a Chinese lady was having such a hard time from Nadia, a quarantine office at Melbourne airport, on this week’s episode of ‘Border Security’ - a long-running behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day life of customs officers at Australia’s busiest airports - especially after failing to declare a huge amount of nuts, seeds and plant life buried in her luggage, despite the strict instructions which greet passengers upon entering Australia. Quarantined goods include all foodstuffs, animal products, skins, feathers, wool, bark, dried flowers, fruits and herbs, right down to soil on your shoes and ‘biological specimens including tissue culture.’ Our disgruntled visitor causes a big drama and refuses to budge for five hours after being issued with the on-the-spot fine of $220.

Also featured is a British backpacker trying his best to look unassuming when traces of morphine and methadone are found in his suitcase. More alarming is how closely he seems to resemble me. His interrogation doesn’t go well, particularly when he refuses to visit the toilet alongside a customs officer, but they let him through regardless. “Maybe I look like a dirty, seedy criminal type,” he says, “Maybe it’s the beard.” Speak for yourself, mate.

Ball or Nothing

England’s first game against the United States was broadcast live here at 4.30am, which certainly didn’t deter associated company from opening a few cans of beer. I’m not sure whether I’m happy to not be so bombarded with all the hysteria of this year’s World Cup, which could probably pass in Bundaberg with all the significance of a school fun run. If previous experience is anything to go by, England seem to overestimate the collective talents of their footballers to such a degree that nothing short of complete disappointment will do. So credit must go to Robert Green for maintaining our track record of goalkeepers with hands like Swiss cheese. He must have seen the Sun headlines flash in front of him before the ball had even trickled over the line. Poor bastard. Let’s put it down to nerves and move on.

Tim Cahill is the big name around here for the superbly titled Socceroos, who received a visit from John Travolta this week to offer some imperative strategic advice ahead of their game tonight with big hitters Germany, their toughest challenge of the group. Cahill is the commercial face of Australian soccer, but Mark Schwarzer and Harry Kewell are prominent too, although the effect of their endorsements have, in my eyes, been very slight. These players were all part of the team’s second round success in 2006, but before then Australia hadn’t qualified for the competition since 1974, and their star players will be past their prime before the next competition in four years time. Despite this, a new book called Soccernomics is claiming that Australia is set to become a huge footballing nation, and that “[a] century from now, Aussie rules might exist only at subsidised folk festivals”. An unlikely thought, although their claim that more youngsters are taking up the sport over rugby could suggest otherwise.

So that’s a thought to chew on, particularly if the Socceroos prove successful at this year’s event, and especially if FIFA accept their ongoing bid to host the 2022 event, which sounds to me like a splendid idea.

So, a bit more detail on where I’m currently living. Bundaberg (or ‘Bundy’ to the locals) is a good 240 miles north of the Queensland state capital, Brisbane, and the first thing you notice is how remarkably flat the landscape is. The best way to view the city is from the Hummock, an inactive volcano turned lookout spot which may only be 96 metres above sea level but still offers a wide enough view of the whole area, from the sea as it brushes the shores of Bargara in the east (a lovely holiday resort with dramatic beachside views and regarded as the starting point of the Great Barrier Reef), to views of the region’s crucial Burnett River, where it is said that pioneering aviator Bert Hinkler flew his aircraft underneath the river’s railway bridge. There is even a bust of Hinkler near the site to celebrate the fact.

Hinkler is one of Bundaberg’s most famous residents, and forgive me for a moment while I bore you with why: Bert may have travelled to England to learn his trade, but his hometown would remain a crucial location for many of his most notably records, eventually settling his light aircraft here after being the first pilot to fly solo from England to Australia in 1928, taking only 15 and a half days to do it (beating the former record by nearly two weeks).

He had a superb mathematical intellect, too, and created technologies during the first world war which would go on to be used in the second. He would also be the first to fly solo across the South Atlantic in 1931 - a remarkable feat, given that for part of the journey he was flying with limited to no visibility. Poor Hinkler’s technical abilities would eventually fail him, however, while attempting to beat a new solo flight record of only 8 days from England to Australia, losing contact while flying over the Tuscan Mountains in 1933. The original landing site of his 1928 journey has now been renamed Hinkler Park in his honour, and you can even visit his Southampton home, which was transported from England to Bundaberg brick by brick and is now a museum on the site of the city’s botanical gardens.

Tall, dense sugar cane fields dominate the surrounding landscape which have thrived in the subtropical temperatures since the first sugar mill opened here in 1882, thus providing the city with global trading potential and a burgeoning economy. Sugar is transported from Bundaberg as well as processed here to create the molasses which is used in the city’s most famous export, Bundaberg Rum, which is available across the world as well as other associated products, but more on this later. In certain areas, when the sugar cane is harvested, huge fields are dramatically set alight to burn any dry leaves and to rid the fields of any damaging infestations, most notably from poisonous snakes, with taipans and brown snakes being the most likely to lurk in the undergrowth.

Farming work in Bundaberg attracts a huge number of backpackers to the area, and more than enough converted hostels to accommodate them. This makes a journey to the supermarkets quite interesting, with communities of Japanese, American and European tourists milling along the aisles. The population here is only 70,000, but that’s still enough to make Bundy within the top 30 most populated cities in the whole of Australia. 26th, to be precise. But the area is large, and residents are free to live in plenty of space, in homes that have become synonymous with the state (called ‘Queenslanders’) which are built on stilts to help cool the inside of the house, especially during the humid summer months. The average yearly temperature in Bundaberg is 26 degrees. July is when it gets really cold here, well, in Queensland terms, with an average low of just under 10 degrees in the winter time.

Given such clear days, I would certainly suggest a trip up to the Hummock at nightfall. Given the flat of the land, the skyline seems to stretch for an unimaginable distance, with the most breathtaking sunsets you’re ever likely to see. A glorious mixture of deep orange splits the burning clouds on one side and is replaced by the first signs of stars from behind you, often simultaneously, and you can almost feel the night creep up on you, like a blanket slowly being lifted. And the stars! Following an evening drive, we step outside and arch our heads for a hypnotising spell under the clear night sky. It takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to such splendour: not only does the moon seem to glow with even more luminance, but you can clearly see the Milky Way with an almost divine potency (no, seriously), and the most famous constellation of the southern hemisphere, the Southern Cross, which is so symbolically important to the country that it features prominently on the country’s flag.

When describing the sky to you now, the word ‘vast’ doesn’t seem to be a big enough word, but vast it is, and completely spellbinding: with daily magnificence like this, it quickly becomes apparent what people mean when they describe Australia as a truly magical place. I can’t wait to discover more.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Deal or No Deal’ (Channel 7)

I’m convinced that you can tell a lot from a country just by how they approach the concept of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A Dutch creation, lest we forget, but just look at how the Brits interpret it: eccentric plebs add camaraderie and real-life drama to opening random boxes, while Noel ‘Crinkly Bottom’ Edmunds hosts with his hairy faced faux charm. It’s mostly a self-conscious effort to appear high spirited in the face of inevitable, crushing disappointment, and no one does that better than the Brits.

The Australian version takes it’s cues, seemingly, from both 1980s American game shows and the sort of crazy-ass Japanese delirium that would probably have the word ninja in the title. The ker-razy host is Andrew O’Keefe, who makes Noel Edmunds look like some boring parking attendant, as he poses and pouts like a coke-filled, malfunctioning Brian Conley. In attempts to keep the quick-talking, epileptic nature of the show pumping, his banter is short and reactionary. Today it’s Carol’s game, and she’s a full time carer looking after her 86 year old father who wants to save enough money for a trip to Holland. “You’re not taking your Dad with you, then?” O’Keefe asks from his gurning face. “I don’t think he’d make it,” she replies, still trying to maintain the forced frivolity of the setup, but luckily he’s not really listening. “OK then!” he yells.

And then there are the rules, which seem to have been made up as they go along, with crazy bonus games thrown in just to confound the viewer further. There are 26 suitcases, with numerical values from 50c to a maximum of $200,000 (and a car, for some reason); contestants are chosen at random from the audience and play along with their best friend, with the audience members opening the cases. They can play along too by guessing the contents of their own box, and if correct, they win $500. And there’s none of this ‘lets talk to the banker’ chicanery - the offers flash up on screen like the values on a slot machine. So far, so relatively comprehensible.

Then, about halfway through, the screen goes mad and Carol has to take a ‘Megaguess’, where random monetary amounts appear on screen. She says one of them, then everyone in the audience groans, there’s a brief moment of unexplained despair and then play continues, leaving no clues as to what just happened. Then, at the end, they wheel out the ‘Supercase’, which is like the gamble option at the end of ‘Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right’, where you can opt to sabotage your overall winnings in favour of eight possible choices. It doesn’t really matter what the player wants to do, though, because O’Keefe bullies them into gambling anyway. Luckily for Carol, it pays off, and she goes home with $30,000.

But I’m yet to mention the ‘Dealettes’, who work in the ‘Dealadrome’ and deliver the 26 suitcases in a get up of identikit blond bobs and blue, sequined dresses. The girls seem to be a prominent feature in just about every other format of the show across the world except Britain, where perhaps the idea of cookie cutter trolley dollys is, I don’t know, a little bit dated, perhaps. And kind of sexist too, actually. All of this happens in less than 30 minutes, by the way, and the whole thing feels like being trapped in an arcade with the fire alarm going off.

Jungle Fever

What most people know about the koala is that it’s not a bear but a marsupial, like a possum or a kangaroo, characterised by its pouch for housing their joeys. It was the colonialists who spotted a similarity to bears, which surely begs the question as to whether they had ever seen a bear close up or just far, far away. Because koala’s are small, tree dwelling fur-balls who, rather boringly, sleep for up to 18 hours a day. Then they invariably eat eucalyptus leaves for their remaining five to six hours of the day, before falling asleep again. These guys turn sloth into an art form.

You can hold a koala at the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, near the beaches on the Gold Coast. The place is a bit like Jurassic Park, shepherding tourists on a miniature train through giant birdcages, animal themed adventure parks and seats fashion from giant plastic crocodiles. Audio guides blurt out information from speakers hidden amongst the bushes. I’m not completely sold on the idea, especially considering the number of, say, lorikeets and parrots you can see just walking down the streets. In fact, head up to North Queensland and you can see most of these animals, albeit outside of their cages and not quite in such a family friendly environment: crocodiles aren’t penned in to makeshift fences but free to devour lagoon-dwelling tourists; tall red kangaroos leap into passing vehicles; a small wallaby, grazing in the bush, might suddenly find itself grappled into the talons of a passing eagle. Yes, Queensland is a wild place. This glorified zoo sanitises danger, like a visitors room at a high security prison, only with better coffee.

Having said that, the Australians are fierce on conservationism, and the sanctuary are currently raising money for their wildlife hospital appeal. It costs $600,000 a year to run the hospital, treating up to 30 animals a day, and they’re planning to build a new one to meet up with the increasing demand of troubled wildlife. The effects of their work can be seen across the park, like their wedge-tailed eagles, who can no longer fly after being rescued from a roadside accident. They’re one of the largest birds of prey in the world with a wingspan of over 7ft, but they would have otherwise been discarded due to their injuries. The sanctuary also provide homes for a number of endangered species which, tragically, will undoubtedly die out during our lifetime. A disheartening thought, especially considering the tree-kangaroo, which is a small, auburn coloured creature with an elongated tail and an astoundingly blasé approach to heights. They can survive a fall of around 60ft, which is quite baffling, but they can’t quite counter the growing effects of habitat loss from deforestation.

They have Tasmanian devils there, too, although being expert scavengers, they’re quite hard to spot. These dog-like, meat-eating animals were considered a pest and hunted into the 1940s, but now face an even larger threat to their existence: the devil facial tumour disease, a form of cancer which only effect these little creatures and, as yet, has no known cure. But the sanctuary are working on this, which is just as well: the disease has allegedly caused a 50% decline in numbers and, since 2009, the Tasmanian devil has been placed on the world’s most endangered species list, something which increases every single day.

From July 2008, it became compulsory for those migrants under the age of 30 who were wishing to extend their work visas to Australia to undergo three months (88 days) of specified regional employment. The initiative, in theory, helps local businesses with an affordable and constant stream of labour to help meet the high demands of peak seasons, especially on farms where, in northern Queensland, everything from cherry tomatoes to figs, grapes, peppers, bananas, macadamia nuts and sugar cane all thrive in lush, abundant fields. Crops are harvested in huge numbers, or intensively farmed inside greenhouses promising fresh produce all year round, and once picked they are then packed and shipped to outlets across the continent. Here, in Bundaberg, the city relies on the land for the majority of its employment: from the many local farms which surround the region and the coastline, to the huge sugar plantations which help to produce the region’s best known export, rum.

But not everyone is in agreement that the new visa scheme works, particularly the backpackers themselves, who often feel exploited and forced to work in somewhat undesirable conditions. I’ve heard stories of terrible living quarters, where suffering employees are too scared to complain unless they lose their minimum wage, to anecdotal evidence of workers dying of dehydration in sheds where, during the sizzling summer months, temperatures can reach over 50 degrees. But the farmers aren’t happy, either, and who can blame them: those under 30 and looking for a second year in Australia are usually university educated or gap year students whose history of manual labour was when they once worked part time on the cash desk at Dixons. They don’t want to be there, which only acts to frustrate the land owners even more. I’ve spent this week working intermittently on the Marcon family plantation, where capsicums and courgettes are picked, priced and packaged for shipment to locations like Sydney and Melbourne, and the motto here seems to be, “however fast you think you’re working, work faster.”

It’s repetitive, draining at times, but the husband and wife who run the farm are adamant that they will not be employing backpackers. The workforce is predominantly made up of locals from the Bundaberg area, both male and female, young and old, creating a communal atmosphere and hard work ethic that I’m sure is lacking on the other farms. Alan, 17, works here full time, along with many of his co-workers, and when he’s not lifting crates of green peppers he’s surfing or riding his BMX. He is following in a family tradition which has forever been a staple of the lives of the people in northern Queensland, steeped in a respect for the land and the fortunes that it brings. So it’s small wonder that when I tell Alan that I’m from England, he replies, “English, eh? Well, we don’t get many backpackers here.” The Marcons have set a precedent in which I’m sure many other local farmers will follow if migration into the country continues to increase.

For further evidence of Australian’s stern conservationism, just look at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s decision to take Japan to the International Court of Justice for their continued whaling in the Antarctic, whose seas have long since been declared as a whale sanctuary. In their defence, the Japanese are allegedly hunting for ‘scientific’ purposes, rather than commercial. Quite what ‘scientific’ reasons these are will be made clear when the countries meet in The Hague, although justifying the deaths of over 2,000 whales a year won’t be easy: unless these scientific reasons extend to building a giant Frankenstein’s sea monster for some kind of covert military operation, reanimated with the head of a dolphin, the tail of a thousand tuna fish and all fashioned out of condemned orca bits.

That’s a disturbing image, but Japan are keen to defend the barbaric practice on traditional hunting lines, while ordinary Australians think that the mammals should just be given a break. The fact that the decision was one of Rudd’s 2007 campaign promises has met with some derision from the local press, who see its fulfilment as a piece of savvy politicising considering that Rudd will be fighting for re-election later in the year. And what if Australia lose the battle in court? It’s unlikely, but embarrassing nonetheless.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘State of Origin: New South Wales v. Queensland’ (Win TV)

Wednesday saw the first of three big ‘football’ (read: rugby) matches between these two giant states of Rugby League, which is disproportionately popular here on the east coast, to the extent where normally placid and well-meaning Australians lose their minds for 80 minutes, screaming at the television and shouting obscenities. I know this to be true after watching the game in a house in Queensland, where every crunching tackle and physical exertion is met with a loud and patriotic yelp. The State of Origin games are a big deal, where every year rugby players forgo their club colours in favour of the state from which they were born, thus creating an almost tribal encounter which seems to garner more national pride (and division in equal measure) than when they play for the national team. So you would think that they could come up with more flattering names for the sides: NSW are the Cockroaches, QLD are called the Cane Toads.

But Queensland are clearly the better team, which helps, winning albeit not particularly comfortably, just like they have done for the previous four years. It was a great game, and I don’t even particularly follow rugby, but it is a shame that commercial station Win TV (or Channel 9) seem so eager to promote Ford’s half year sale that they even show their adverts during the game. Granted, this only happens when play stops after a try, but such trigger happy commercialism reminds me of watching TV in America, which is perhaps the closest equivalent to looking after a hyperactive child.