Fire!

I guess the fires here have been in the news over there, it’s hard to say what an effect it has had here. In a land where fire is a fact of life, this is the worst disaster ever.

A series of fires have left whole towns in ashes across the state of Victoria, over 300 people have lost their lives, nearly 2000 homes gone, countless animals, hectares of national park and livelihoods gone. It’s simply horrible.

Unbelievably some of the fires were deliberately lit, it’s hard to find words for the contempt these people are held in, but arson in bushland is a serious problem here. Seriously hot days, bone dry forests and strong winds are bad enough…an idiot with a petrol bomb is the final straw.

Today the police got hold of a guy who will be charged. If it is him, he should be grateful the police got to him first. Similarly with the handful of people who have been charged with looting.

Adelaide has been really lucky that a similar thing didn’t happen here. We’ve got very similar conditions – houses surrounded by trees, a drought which has left fire fuel everywhere, a record heatwave (Jeez, that was tough), and for a few days some very strong and hot winds. We’ve had fires, lots of them, but fortunately they have not turned into something as devastating as those over the border.

We’re not out of the woods yet though, there is plenty of hot weather to come yet. And the fires are still burning in Victoria. A bit of rain and a cool change has eased conditions but it will take weeks to get all the fires under control.

Meanwhile as half of the country is in unprecedented drought and with fires burning across huge areas of the south and threatening the rest, the north of the country is totally flooded.

Queensland, at 688,000 square miles – 7 times the size of the UK – is flooded across two thirds of the state. However, as the drought has hit parts of Queensland as well, apparently over 50% of the state is still officially in drought. Even though it is under water.

One side effect of floods in this area is that large crocodiles will come further inland and wading through the main street of your town suddenly becomes highly perilous. Tragically a five year old boy was taken by a croc last week.

A town called Katherine in the north was flooded a couple of years ago, when the waters resided a large croc (large is 4m of more!) was still wandering aimlessly along the main street.

And they call this the lucky country!

But the fires are all the news here and now incredible stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances are starting to emerge. It’s a huge tragedy but I can’t help thinking this is a great country with great people with a great spirit.

Back to Adelaide and the fires and floods have knocked the other great Aussie summer story of sharks off the front page.

Great whites have taken at least one swimmer recently (near Perth) with several other limbs chewed off and various close shaves. My favourite was a swimmer who punched a shark on the nose and escaped with a couple of cuts and grazed knuckles. His interview outside the hospital was priceless, ‘I saw this big thing come from nowhere, so I smashed him’.

In Adelaide there are sightings every day of 4m+ sharks at the beaches, usually in chest deep water only 20m from the beach. And in Sydney this week two people have lost arms in separate attacks.

However, while summer in Adelaide is, as ever, hot and full of sharks, much has changed for the girls and me.

Jasmin is nearly two, she is running, jumping, has plenty of words and is very cheeky but also charming and beautiful. Mandy can’t run or jump so well, but has even more words and is even cheekier. And of course charming and beautiful too.

We’ve also moved house a little further into the hills. We still get koalas, possums, huge spiders and, a couple of nights ago, the biggest stick insect I’ve ever seen on the front door. It must have been 6 inches long.

There are some truly weird things in my overgrown and mysterious garden. Mandy and I had a beer on the veranda a few nights ago, as dusk came a baby koala frolicked in one of our trees, possums jumped from branch to branch and kookaburras cackled to eachother from the old gum tree. It was a beautiful evening.

Then the sun went down and suddenly there were unexplained rustles nearby and flying bugs crashing into us; the garden became a menacing and scary place. We retreated to get a refill and stayed inside watching hairy spiders march across the lounge room window.

So that’s it for now, I hope this finds everyone well. It’s been a good while since we put anything here and I’ll try to be a more regular correspondent. If you’re still out there, there are more pictures of life here on Facebook and it would be great to hear from you.

Cheers
Will, Mandy & Jas

Day 14

I hate to be a whingeing Pom, but it’s bloody hot here. We are currently setting records for Australia, today is the 14th straight day above 35C, that’s 95F in old money. And there are still two more days before the forecast cool change.

Yesterday was 42C (107F) and the whole of Adelaide is slowly grinding to a halt. The streets are deserted, the sky a pure piercing blue and the winds are blowing from the north which is just hot desert and feel like an open oven. I can honestly feel my face burning in the breeze.

There are power cuts due to the load the air conditioners are putting on the grid and for those of us with no air con, it’s just bloody hot. There is no respite at night either, last night was 30C which made for an uncomfortable night for Mandy and I.

Jasmin just sleeps through it though; she’s a tough little Aussie, not a big soft Pom like us two.

Just to put this all in perspective, no civilised part of Australia has had this many consecutive days this hot since records began. Adelaide has not just beaten the previous records, it has smashed them.

It is hotter here than in Alice Springs which is ridiculous, Alice is in the middle of harsh, unforgiving desert and should by rights be much warmer every single day.

There is a total fire ban across the state, which means no fires at all. Anywhere. The risk of bush fire is extreme, there have been a few big ones already not far from the city which have destroyed property and vineyards but fortunately not hurt anyone.

It will be a miracle if there are no bush fires, especially with the number of arsonists around at this time of year.

One woman who is going to trial about now is accused of lighting 45 fires in the Adelaide Hills over the last couple of years! She apparently had her two toddlers in the back of the car as she drove around setting fire to the bone dry grass and woods.

While there are more than a few kangaroos loose in her top paddock, she is not alone. I am told that a lot of the people who start these fires are members of the fire service. In a place four times as big as the UK with a population of 1.5 million there are some small gene pools and ideal places for people to go potty.

So, fingers crossed we make it to Wednesday. And a bit of rain would be nice too, not a drop since before Xmas in Adelaide.

Apart from the heat and chance of fires tearing across the state, everything is going pretty well. Jasmin is growing into a proper little monkey, crawling everywhere at great pace and nearly walking. She has also mastered getting up the stairs which I am quite proud of but which sends Mandy into fits.

She’ll be one on April 11th, everyone told us time would fly by, but I never believed them until now.

As for Adelaide, the festival season is drawing to a close and we’ll all be returning to the sleepy town/city mode for the next 9 months. The street car racing grandstands are coming down, the opera singers have packed and left and the comedians have gone to Melbourne, leaving Adelaide to relax and get on with drinking coffee and gossiping which is what we do best.

Cheers for now, hope all is well.

WM&J

Ages

Hello and Happy Christmas to all on this the longest day.

It has been a while since we wrote anything and there is plenty to tell you. However, there is a more immediate reason for writing again; we missed the date for sending Christmas cards overseas.

So firstly best wishes for the season and please excuse the impersonal nature of this greeting.

Anyway, eight months of news condensed into thirty minutes writing before I head to the pub for a Christmas drink.

As you can see above Jasmin was born in April and has been growing ever since. She’s a darling little thing, very patient with us and good natured. She seems very relaxed about things and is content to sit in her Jolly Jumper bouncing all day.

Mandy is loving being a mum, it’s all coffee mornings and lie ins from what I can see. She might go back to work for a couple of shifts a week in April. Then again she might not.

I’ve left my job at Adelaide City Council and now run the Australian office of Projects Abroad full time. I was doing it at weekends for a few months but it got quite busy so I thought it was worth a go.

It is quite a change from the council which was a very sociable place. Now I sit all alone in my office making things up as I go along. So not too much has changed and fortunately a lot of my mates from the council are still happy to consort with me.

As for the house, there are still koalas in the garden, and parrots of all types and an eagle that soars over us from time to time. An echidna even wandered across our garden a few nights ago while I was surveying the uncontrolled scrub that is our block.

Someone told me this was a very good sign indeed. I think it’s a sign that we have a lot of ants in the garden.

We also have a family of brown snakes which everyone apart from me has now seen. These are snakes which are brown, very well camouflaged and very venomous. I thought I’d caught one a few weeks ago, but I’ll tell you about that another day.

In September Keith & Helen Mitchell passed through Adelaide and it was great to catch up with them. I thought he was a big hard northern bloke, but he proved to be a big softie when he met a koala.

Shortly afterwards my brother Nick and the lovely Cheles came to visit. I think he enjoyed himself, my highlight was driving to Ayers Rock. It was 1500 miles and took two long days of staring at pretty much nothing out of the window. But it was well worth the trip and good fun.

He also proved to be a big softie when feeding a little wallaby in Alice Springs. Cheles and I were dying of thirst and couldn’t drag him away to join the rest of the town in the pub.

Then in November we came back to England for a few weeks to let Jasmin meet everyone. It was great to be back watching proper football with a proper beer and eating real fish and chips and a decent curry. And lovely to catch up with everyone we did manage to in Manchester, Somerset and other spots.

However, I didn’t plan it very well and missed seeing half the people we wanted to, so my apologies for being so disorganised, it would have been fantastic to see you all but beyond my powers of organisation.

Which brings us up to today. Christmas Day is forecast to be bright and around 28 degrees which is as close to perfect as is possible.

And it’s Jasmin’s first Christmas, which is all the presents that we need and as she is only interested in wrapping paper and gift tags, it will probably be the cheapest one for years to come!

Anyway, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone, we’ll write more soon. Keep in touch and keep well.

Mandy, Jas & Will

Tiny

Last Wednesday at 6.58pm Adelaide time, Jasmin Lily arrived, 7lb 6oz and six days early.

It all happened very quickly, at 2.00pm Mandy was reading a book on the balcony, at 3.00pm were on our way to her regular check up. At 4.00 she was in the delivery room and to everyone’s surprise, particularly the midwife’s, a mother by 7.00.

All in all it went pretty smoothly from where I was standing, although Mandy tells a different story.

Since then the girls have come home and settled in, we haven’t got a clue what we are doing but Jasmin is being very patient so far. And obviously, we are thrilled to bits.

I had one wobble when a friend sent some flowers with the note 'welcome little Aussie!'. Well, that threw me and I quickly took little Jaz for a walk around the ward to explain things to her. I think she understood it pretty well.

And that’s it for now, all of a sudden there seem to be a thousand things that need doing!

Cheers for now
M, W & J

Rain

At last. For the first time in four months the endless, cloudless blue skies gave over to a charming and brooding shade of grey. And the drab clouds emptied warm torrential rain on the city. Bliss. People left their offices to stand in the deluge to make sure it was real.

The effects were almost instant. The gum trees on our lot visibly perked up, appearing visibly greener, the leaves no longer hanging limp. The creek beds came back to life as the first trickles ran down from the hills. Our water tanks over flowed and Mandy had a bath to celebrate.

Seriously though, while some parts of Australia have flooded, we have had the driest winter on record. The grape harvest is around half what would be expected, other crops suffered similarly and the pastoral regions up north are full of painfully skinny cattle and sheep.

Most alarmingly though, the mighty River Murray has hardly anything in it; partly because the winter snow never came, partly due to the drought but also because farmers in four states take far too much water to irrigate needless crops like cotton and rice.

The river meets the sea about an hour from Adelaide and apparently it is only waist deep at the moment and its estuary, one of world significance for bird and fish life, has nearly dried up. This is a massive river, really massive, it runs for 2300 miles and without care and some painful sacrifices, it will be dead before long.

Moving on, the clocks went back last week. Assuming the clocks went forward in the UK at the same time, we jumped from 10½ to 8½ hours ahead. But daylight saving is not that straightforward in Australia, mostly because each state can decide if it wants to change its clocks or not. And some states like to be different; all of which can be very confusing.

Let me try to explain. Adelaide is on Central Time which is 30 minutes behind the east coast. I have no idea why we picked a half hour difference, but nevertheless, it covers South Australia and the Northern Territory, although nobody much cares what happens in the Territory.

Western Australia is 1½ hours behind SA and 2 hours behind the eastern cities.

However, when summertime comes it all changes. Some states put the clocks forward some don’t. The Northern Territory doesn’t and neither does Queensland, (who like to be different). So one day we are half an hour behind Brisbane, then the next day we are half an hour ahead.

Just to confuse everyone WA is now giving daylight saving a go. They have never done so before and everyone is very happy for them, but convincing them has been a struggle.

It is fair to say that they are an odd bunch in WA. Isolated from civilisation (or what passes for it here) by 2000 miles of desert they have always believed that changing the clocks will bleach the colour from their curtains and that the cows will not milk. The bus timetables would also prove to be a challenge. So it is a big step for them.

Now the first trial has ended, the state’s housewives and farmers will be scratching their chins, checking the milk and debating if it’s worth another go next year.

Anyway, back to the home front. No news yet on the little one, due on 17th April, but any minute now I guess. This has meant a slow Easter break with nothing planned except waiting, tidying the house and eating.

Mandy can’t sleep very well right now, certainly can’t walk very far and is pretty much good for nothing else, so I reckon the sooner the child comes along the better. But she’s doing a great job and looks very well on it, even if she hobbles like a lady twice her age first thing in the morning.

Apart from that, it’s been a lovely autumn so far the weather is warm, rain is in the air, the skies clear and yesterday an eagle was soaring over our house.

Hope all is well.
M&W

Close

It’s all getting close now, Mandy needs a walking frame in the mornings, a long sleep in the afternoon and a massage every night. Bless her.

Despite her handicaps she is a little battler and looks very good with her unfeasibly large belly, I might even go so far as to say she is blooming.

This happy demeanour is helped in no small part by finishing work a whole six weeks before the due date! Even hobbling around the house in the manner of an aged donkey, it is difficult to wipe the little grin from her face. Knowing she has no patients to moan about and a full programme of daytime TV ahead of makes her very happy.

So I guess things are moving into the ‘anytime now’ phase, a shame in some ways because March is potty in Adelaide. For 31 days we are transformed from a drought stricken backwater to the cultural hub of Australia. While this is not necessarily a stellar accolade, it is a proud time with something for everyone.

Within the square mile of the city in the month of March we have so far managed to host an international music festival in the botanic gardens, a film festival across the dozens of cinemas we have, (no idea how they all stay open), our own Fringe with loads of international comedians, a V8 ‘supercar’ race through the city streets and now, this week, the World Police and Fire Games.

The city is reeling! Normally Adelaide is a place in which people mind their own business while sipping quiet glasses of wine and quietly moaning about the neighbours. But in March a whole new world of noise envelopes the city.

If it’s not African drummers echoing across the parks through the night, it’s the throaty, beer lubricated voice of the V8 fan, his/her face decked in a huge ZZ Top style beard a fistful of hot dogs.

Every red blooded Aussie bloke wants a V8 and every red blooded Sheila wants to ride shotgun. And you must be a poof if you don’t want one! There is only one thing better than a V8 saloon…a V8 ute. This pinnacle of Aussie driving should ideally come complete with roll bars which double as a rest for your rifle as you go out looking for rabbits or kangaroos with your mates and a carton of stubbies.

Anyway, the parrots are starting to return to the parks now the cars have gone and we have the wonderful spectacle of the World Police and Fire Games which started today.

This is a massive event, bigger than the Commonwealth Games, which must be Adelaide’s biggest international event ever. Over the last couple of days there have been many many lost looking policemen wearing Polizei Berlin and bright orange Fire Amsterdam t shirts.

They all seem very happy to be here, particularly the guys from Cologne who were having their photo taken outside the police station on Wakefield Street. We can’t wait for the Japanese contingent to arrive to have their pictures taken by speed cameras and outside night clubs at closing time.

If today is anything to go by, the next few weeks will see every pub, (and there are a few), heaving with officers who managed to convince their superintendent that they were pretty handy at snooker or darts. The PSNI contingent were more than noticeable in the Irish pub on St Patrick’s Day; athletic was not a word that leapt to mind.

These games are undoubtedly a fantastic institution but at the same time I am sure the publicans of Adelaide will always look back on this time with a tear of fondness in heir eye.

Before I go, well done to John McGarty who has just bought his first house and managed to put together an IKEA bed, a pat on the back for me for beating some Aussies at golf and a big cheer for Mandy who has it tough but keep smiling.

Hope all is well

M&W

Back

Hello again, remember us?

It’s been ages since the last post, I could say I have been busy but I doubt many would believe me. So let’s just say I’ve been lazy.

Lazy pretty much describes Adelaide at the moment, it is mid summer and extremely hot. For three days it has been around 40C (104F) without a cloud in the sky or a breath of wind. In this weather it is difficult to do anything outside, the streets are deserted and the swimming pools are doing brisk business.

The beaches are pretty busy as well, but as there have been a few close encounters with sharks lately, nobody goes in much past their waist. Particularly Mandy, who is convinced that one will get her sooner or later.

Anyway, in this weather she prefers to sit near the air conditioning. With eight weeks to go she is enormous, has a red face and bad back and is far from lively. The poor thing. She is doing very well though, and the scans all look great.

She seems to have a new scan every week as part of some research she signed up for. It means she gets pampered, has a weekly gossip and gets dozens more photos of the baby.

This time of year is a slow time for news in Australia so to fill the papers there are daily shark, snake and bush fire stories. This time of year is great for a fire; bone dry forests, hot winds and searing heat make for a potent cocktail. Last week five fires started in Victoria just from lightning strikes.

In the midst of these fire, the heat wave and Mandy getting bigger, I took a trip to Cambodia and Thailand. It wasn’t a particularly popular move with everyone in the house, but necessary for a new job I have taken on.

After finishing university I spent a few months in Moldova teaching in a couple of schools. The organisation who arranged that consisted of a professor in his spare bedroom at the time. Since then it has flourished and now employs around 150 people all over the world.

Projects Abroad arranges voluntary humanitarian placements and work experience for nearly 3000 people every year in over 20 countries from Peru to Nepal. My role is to try and recruit hordes of willing Australians to teach English in Mongolia or work in Cambodian orphanages.

I’m looking forward to spending some time on this, it’s an exciting opportunity which I have been doing part time for a few months. However, it deserves more time and I will be dropping a few days at the city council to get stuck into it.

The organisation was kind enough to send me to look over some of the things our volunteers are upto in Phnom Penh and Ao Nang in the south of Thailand and to be honest I was most impressed.

The responsibility and commitment shown to the orphanages by the volunteers in Cambodia was amazing. Phnom Penh is a difficult place to explain. I found it very easy to like but the poverty was highly visible and most depressing.

A lot of the volunteers remarked on how inspirational the kids were; this was easy to see when I spent a bit of time in the orphanages watching a little girl with no arms just wanting to play and join in everything. Cambodia is a bit like that, despite a terrifying recent history, third world poverty and social issues which desperately need addressing, it is an optimistic and very friendly place which deserves a lot of luck and a big leg up.

Another bonus was catching up with some friends from Adelaide who are working for aid organisations in Phnom Penh, it was great to catch up with Kristien, Bryan and Lisa who are all doing some pretty gutsy and good things for the Fred Hollows Foundation and Servants of the Urban Poor. Good on yer guys.

On the other hand our volunteers in Thailand were living in paradise, although they were working very hard and doing a great job in conservation of coral reefs and mangrove swamps. This is an important project which helps to preserve a wonderful environment and educates local people on sustaining it for fishing and tourism.

I have to admit that this was fun as, in the name of conservation, we dived on the reefs surrounding Pi Pi island watching turtles swim by and clearing discarded fishing net from the coral. Even sinking upto my waist in mangrove mud while we collected seeds on another day was enjoyable. I left feeling more than a little envious of the volunteers who had a couple more months to go.

On my return to Adelaide, a still disgruntled Mandy announced it was time to get the nursery ready. Up until this point the designated room was still full of empty boxes from the move and a pile of rubbish which seemed important in the old house.

However, after a couple of days of dragging my heels around the baby shops of the city the room has been transformed. It is now full of boxes of things which need unpacking and putting together and is an even bigger mess.

While Mandy was getting a little agitated about our lack of preparation I was very happy to see that just about everybody else at the ante natal classes had done little more than flick through an IKEA catalogue.

Finally, while talking about these things, congratulations to Scott and Becky who gave birth to Amylia Janice on January 17th. Nice one guys.

Hope all is well
M&W