Oldies

It has been a while since our last post. And even though I work for the council, it has been a busy few weeks.

I hope all is well with you as the winter closes in.

One of the reasons for my slack attitude to this page is that my parents arrived in Australia. I think Belgium was their previous record distance from home, but here they were blinking in the spring sun, wondering what day it was and, in the case of my mum, looking anxiously around for rogue roos.

So these past three weeks have been spent scouring South Australia for something new to do. I like to think we broke new ground, I don’t think anyone has spent three weeks on holiday in South Australia voluntarily before this.

Perhaps they are easily pleased, or maybe everyone else is missing out on a seriously cool place.

I prefer the latter.

To be fair, there are some fantastic places here. I reckon the trip will take a few posts to describe their travels through this mostly underrated part of the country.
A few beers after collecting them from the airport, we drove north to the Flinders Ranges, a cool six hour drive to some pretty bleak, depressingly dry but awesome scenery with views further than you can ever imagine.

We eventually ended up at a place called Wilpena Pound, via pies at Two Wells, coffee at Port Pirie, more pies at Quorn, petrol at Hawker and a comfort stop or two in the middle of nowhere.

Wilpena Pound is a strange place, it is a geological wonder of rugged peaks, sheer rock faces and weird flora all making a huge moutainous ring surrounded by not much but endless flat and arid land as far as you can ever dream of. A unique place.

However, instead of intrepid and bearded climbing types it is a place which retirees flock to in their camper vans, to sit in deck chairs under a tree, look at a billion stars and listen to Jeremy and Don, the only band prepared to travel this far for a gig.

Bless them. Amped up in the desert with an adoring audience of old folk gagging for a sing along as they dined.

We arrived a little late for dinner to discover the remains of the buffet; a hundred wrinklies can pass through a roast beef buffet like a swarm of locusts through a Biblical wheat field.

While dad and I were trying to salvage a helping from the remains of the bread and butter pudding and trifle, my mother, unknown to us, was waltzing around the floor with Tony the crooner. One glass of wine is normally more than enough for her, but carried away with the desert air, she had got through two glasses and was now throwing herself around the floor with poor Tony from County Down a mere passenger.

This was a slick band and they worked their captive and ageing audience beautifully. Jeremy and his Yamaha organ led the way with cheeky jokes, Colin with the banjo was a heavily bearded yet understated team player, Don was the versatile virtuoso who could move effortlessly between the drums and, to the delight of the crowd, the washboard…how they loved that!

As for the other bloke in the band, I can’t remember his name, but he was a real diamond. On more than one occasion he nearly took the singer’s eye out with some elaborate trombone slides and, as the excitement of ‘My Friend the Wind’ (!!!) swept him away, he kicked over his glass of wine and had to put down his trombone and run off to get a cloth.

And as he creaked to all fours to mop up the wine, Don and Jeremy played manfully on like the consummate professionals they have been for 40 years. Meanwhile, Tony found a new freedom in his floor show, hunting down cheery fossils to dance with instead of keeping an anxious eye on the brass section.

After that, I insisted we cooked on the barbecue for the next couple of nights. But yet the haunting refrain of a hundred oldies singing to ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ drifted across the desert night to serenade us and our kangaroo kebabs.

The Flinders Mountains are an amazing place. If you are not stuck behind a convoy of grandparents spending the inheritance then you must be surrounded by animals of all shapes and sizes in abundance.

Great mobs of roos and emus line the dirt tracks while huge monitor lizards bask, almost daring the soaring eagles to have a go. One on hike, my dad and I found eight different species of lizard within an hour and a scorpion under every rock we turned over. It’s a very cool place.

Anyway, I reckon that’s enough for now. There’s more soon, but first it’s the Melbourne Cup, ‘the race that stops a nation’. That’s tomorrow, (Tuesday), and I haven’t picked my horse yet. That will be my job for the morning.

Then it’s less than three weeks until the first test match….

Cheers
M&W